Ivor Catt
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Ivor Catt (born 1935) is a British electronics engineer known principally for his controversial approach to electromagnetism. He received B.Eng. degree from Cambridge University, and has won two major product awards for his innovative computer chip designs (see Awards section below).
His most recent challenge to the status quo in electromagnetism is called "The Catt anomaly".
[edit] Early life and family history
Ivor Catt in 1942, aged 7, was in Singapore when the Japanese began their invasion. He was on one of the last four boats to leave (two of which were sunk) while the Japanese were doing their preliminary bombardment. His father, Sidney Catt, was in charge of electronics on the RAF airbase, and was captured and made a POW. His mother won the top honors in mathematics from Royal Holloway College, London University. Ivor Catt won a scholarship to read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge University, but transferred to engineering.
[edit] History
The first known article by Ivor Catt explaining his controversial ideas on electromagnetics was published in the British magazine Wireless World in 1978, although he had earlier written an article in New Scientist about computing problems [1]. The Wireless World article discussed the similarities between capacitors and transmission lines, and claimed that all capacitors were, in fact, nothing other than transmission lines [2]. Catt claimed to have discovered this based on his work on high speed logic systems while working for Motorola, Phoenix, USA in the late 1960s. Catt's own explanation of how he became interested in this subject is shown below.
I entered the computer industry when I joined Ferranti (now ICL) in West Gorton, Manchester, in 1959. I worked on the SIRIUS computer. When the memory was increased from 1,000 words to a maximum of 10,000 words in increments of 3,000 by the addition of three free-standing cabinets, there was trouble when the logic signals from the central processor to free-standing cabinets were all crowded together in a cableform 3 yards long. ... Sirius was the first transistorised machine, and mutual inductance would not have been significant in previous thermionic valve machines...In 1964 I went to Motorola to research into the problem of interconnecting very fast (1 ns) logic gates ... we delivered a working partially populated prototype high speed memory of 64 words, 8 bits/word, 20 ns access time. ... I developed theories to use in my work, which are outlined in my IEEE Dec 1967 article (EC-16, n6) ... In late 1975, Dr David Walton became acquainted ... I said that a high capacitance capacitor was merely a low capacitance capacitor with more added. Walton then suggested a capacitor was a transmission line. Malcolm Davidson ... said that an RC waveform [Maxwell’s continuous ‘extra current’ for the capacitor, the only original insight Maxwell made to EM] should be ... built up from little steps, illustrating the validity of the transmission line model for a capacitor [charging/discharging]. (This model was later published in Wireless World in Dec 78.)’-
extract from Electromagnetic Theory Volume 2, Ivor Catt, St Albans, 1980, pp. 207-15 - [3]
[edit] Catt's views on electromagnetism
[edit] Capacitors and displacement current
Catt's work on equating capacitors to transmission lines came as a result of his work in trying to provide adequate fast decoupling to the power supplies for very fast (sub nanosecond rise time) logic circuits at Motorola. He was apparently one of the first people to realise that parallel power planes (in common use today) acted more like transmission lines than capacitors. From this realisation he developed his equivalence theory. Following on from this, he claims that Maxwell's displacement current term is not in fact needed to explain capacitor operation because displacement current is not needed in a transmission line.
However, the article is highly indicative and suggestive of stepwise charging of capacitors [4]. Catt has championed the Heaviside case of two conductors propagating a slab of energy current.
Another part of Catt's thinking on capacitors was that they do not contain any internal ESL and that the ESR quoted by manufacturers is simply the characteristic impedance of the TL formed by the capacitor plates. These ideas have to some extent gained credence in the high frequency modelling of chip capacitors, where the transmission line model appears to give closer representation than the RLC model.[5] [6] [7]
[edit] Nature of the electron
Catt suggests that the electron is a standing wave or trapped Heaviside energy current. Ivor Catt found problems with Maxwell's view but solved them by proving that a pair of wires is a capacitor, in IEEE Trans. EC-16, 1967, and Proc. IEE, June 83 & June 87, also in book Digital Hardware Design, Macmillan 1979 now free on line at [8]
[edit] Inductors
Later, Catt claimed (along with his associates), that inductors too could be thought of as transmission lines. The derivation is more complex than the capacitor case and involves consideration of the "odd" and "even" modes of EM propagation in an inductor. Catt claims to have proved the equivalence for one and two turn inductors. It was peer-reviewed and published without objection in Proc. IEE, June 1987.
[edit] Transmission lines
Catt claims that most components act like transmission lines. He claims that a charged transmission line is similar to a capacitor and says that pulses become trapped inside open circuit lines travelling from end to end at the speed of propagation in the medium. He agrees that they cannot be detected but insists that they are there, based on the argument that EM waves cannot be slowed down or stopped. Since EM waves have been used to charge the transmission line, his argument goes, they must still be present continually reciprocating (as he puts it). From this postulate, and the one about no current or charge, he concludes that charge is gravitationally trapped energy current or flow of energy.
[edit] Energy current
As opposed to normal current (flow of charge), Catt uses energy current to describe most effects. This is a flow of energy defined by the Poynting vector (E×H). Energy current was originally postulatd by Oliver Heaviside.
[edit] Charge
Catt does not admit the existence of electric charge as a fundamental entity and he claims that all charge is composed of trapped Heaviside energy current.
[edit] Electric current
Catt does not see the necessity of electric current (i.e. flow of charge) for the transmission line energy delivery mechanism, except as a slow, resistive, drift in response to the energy-carrying light speed Heaviside energy current.
[edit] Copper as a dielectric material
One of Catt's latest ideas concerns his treatment of copper as a dielectric material with infinite dielectric constant.
[edit] The Catt anomaly
The "Catt anomaly", relates to a parallel twin-conductor transmission line. When a step electromagnetic wave travels from left to right, he asks, "Where does the charge on the bottom (return) conductor come from?" He proceeds to say that it cannot come from anywhere due to the limitation on the speed of charge carriers in the conductors or dielectric.
The subtext of his argument here seems to be that charge from the conductors is not necessary for the transmission of EM waves in transmission lines. The electric field carrying the energy precedes and causes subsequent electron drift current, but the field is not itself charge, but rather Heaviside "energy current", light speed electromagnetic energy.
Catt in his article "Waves in Space", Wireless World March 1983, gives a clear experimental demonstration that the energy stored in a charged object never slows down. Because equal Heaviside energy currents are flowing in each opposite direction in a charged object, there is no net magnetic field and no electron drift current or resistance resulting therefrom. To prove this, Catt charged up objects of length x through a resistor to v volts and measured the discharge, which was a pulse 2x/c seconds long at v/2 volts. His explanation is that in a static charge, energy is flowing equally in each direction. When discharged, the energy already going towards the discharge point exits first, while the remainder (initially going the wrong way) goes to the other end of the conductor, reflects back via the bound end electron, and exits subsequently.
[edit] Electron spin
In March 1979, Catt, Walton, and Davidson published another article in Wireless World.
Catt claimed to have solved the paradox of electron spin by saying an electron is a trapped Heaviside energy current. His theory implies that gravitation traps the energy, like the bending of light by gravity. He then predicted that the size of the electron is then similar to a black-hole, far smaller than the Planck size suggested by "string theory". To test this, the gravity strength resulting from Catt's work can be calculated, and it appears correct.
[edit] Digital logic
Catt has a long-standing dispute about "exclusive-or" in Boolean algebra. He has noted that "and", "or", "exclusive-or" (and their inverses) are the six functions out of the 16 possible functions of two Boolean inputs for which A op B is the same as B op A. Catt calls this "symmetric", and complains that Boolean algebra deals with "and" and "or" and ignores "ex-or". He appears to have been arguing this since his IC design days, when he apparently failed to convince his boss of the business case for having an EXOR function in the product range. In all this time Catt appears not to have seen that De Morgan's Laws state that a "positive-logic AND" is a "negative-logic OR" and vice versa.
[edit] Public arguments
[edit] Electromagnetics
Ivor Catt has achieved some notoriety in the British electrical and electronics establishment by trying to get eminent professors in electrical engineering or electromagnetics such as Dr Neil McEwan (Reader in Electromagnetics, Bradford university) and Professor M. Pepper (University) to comment on the Catt anomaly. He has then used any differing answers to publicly lambast all sides and to try to cause disharmony in the ranks and debunk completely the foundations of currently accepted thinking on electromagnetic theory.
[edit] Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC)
Catt stated in Electronics World September 2003 issue, "EMC - A Fatally Flawed Discipline" pages 44-52:
during the Falklands War, the British warship HMS Sheffield had to switch off its radar looking for incoming missiles ... This is why it did not see incoming Exocet missiles, and you know the rest. How was it that after decades of pouring money into the EMC community, this could happen ... that community has gone into limbo, sucking in money but evading the real problems, like watching for missiles while you talk to HQ.
This is confirmed on a recent official Ministry of Defence internet site [9]: "Mutual Interference between the SATCOM and EW systems onboard HMS Sheffield resulted in the inability to detect an incoming Exocet missile during the Falklands war resulting in the loss of the ship and the lives of 20 sailors." However the BBC report [10] does not blame interference: "The Exocet missile is designed to skim the sea to avoid radar detection."
[edit] Awards
Ivor Catt inspired the design of the world’s first wafer-scale integration product, a 160 MB solid state memory in 1988, that won Sinclair's spin-off, Anamartic, the‘Product of the Year Award’ from the U.S. journals Electronic Design [11] (on 26 October 1989) and also from Electronic Products [12] (in January 1990), after Sir Clive Sinclair’s offshoot computer company, Anamartic, invested £16 million.
[edit] Support from Electronics World magazine editors and writers
Catt has complained bitterly at professional journals refusing to publish his ideas and has effectively accused the establishment of a conspiracy against him: [13]
Dr Arnold Lynch (who designed part of the first programmable computer, that helped defeat Hitler and the Nazis) [14] supported Catt and corresponded with Nigel Cook from 1996-2001, while the latter was publishing the peer-reviewed journal Science World (ISSN 1367-6172).
In 1998 Lynch succeeded in pushing the Catt Anomaly into an IEE meeting and publication: [15] In consequence, Electronics World editors Martin Eccles and Phil Reed began publishing articles about Catt's work and later Catt's own articles. The material from Catt's co-authors and acolytes in Electronics World (such as Cook) focusses on the modification to Maxwell's equations introduced by treating the capacitor as a transmission line, and related errors in Maxwell's model for light, unified electromagnetism, and so on.
[edit] War of words with New Scientist magazine
Ivor Catt has engaged in a war of words with the current editor of New Scientist Jeremy Webb [16] and its previous editor [17].
[edit] Quotes on Ivor Catt
"Depending on who you talk to in the generally conservative semiconductor industry, Catt is either a crank or a visionary. ..."
- New Scientist, 12 June 1986, p35;
"Ivor Catt [is] an innovative thinker whose own immense ability in electronics has all too often been too far ahead of conventional ideas to be appreciated..."
- Wafers herald new era in computing, New Scientist, 25 February 1989, p75[18].
"By virtue of his involvement, Catt knows all the ins and outs of one of the major scientific scandals of the last 15 years, viz. the systematic suppression in the world of electronics of all publications about the phenomenon of the so-called glitch and its ramifications."
- Professor Edsger W. Dijkstra, Burroughs Research Fellow [19]
"There was a realisation in the mid 1970s that a capacitor was in fact a transmission line ... Catt, attempting to bypass what he felt were erroneous interpretations, based everything on those concepts first proposed by Heaviside. The price that must be paid for this is computational complexity as the treatment is distributed in space. Nevertheless, his formulations of propagating TEM waves involve a network which looks identical to what we now call a two-dimensional series TLM mesh … Both Johns and Catt provide numerical modelling systems which are based on the use of electrical networks to treat electromagnetic analogues of physical problems. … The approaches of Johns and Catt provide a firm basis for the rules that are applied and once this is clear, then it is possible to intrude into that 'what-if' land (what if we relax some of the strict electromagnetics rules?) and research of this nature is in progress at this moment."
- Some insights into the history of numerical modelling, by D. de Cogan, School of Information Systems, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, recent IEE paper: PDF[20], http [21]
The Sinclair team has developed the ideas of a British inventor, Ivor Catt, who tried to get British firms to listen to him. On that point this newspaper must admit to the British disease – we didn’t have the bottle to write about Catt then, in part because the technological establishment dismissed his notions. On the risk front, Sinclair has tackled, via Catt, the fundamental breakthrough of the microchip business. ... A whole new range of opportunities for computer use come forward.
– Hamish McRae, The Guardian, 13 March 1985, p23
The Nobel Laureate Dr Gerardus 't Hooft, who won the prize in 1999 for work on electroweak gauge theory, stated recently:
Please remove me from this list. I don't want my in-box to be polluted by all this nonsense about Maxwell's equations. The Maxwell equations correctly describe the propagation of signals as well as the conservation of charge in capacitors, period. Keep me out of any further discussions. [22]
[edit] Current status of Catt's ideas
The view of Catt's ideas by conventional physicists is that his earlier work on digital logic circuits is of value, but his later ideas about electromagnetism are of no use. The scientific and engineering establishments have generally declined to accept his arguments as being worthy of discussion, since (in the view of conventional physics) a hundred years of experimental work shows that Maxwell's equations are well validated in the real world, and do not need to be "corrected." In particular, the fact that Catt's views are not expressed in compact mathematical form (Catt's view is that the use of mathematics in physics is "skillful manipulation of meaningless symbols") means that, in the conventional view, his work is out of the scope of conventional physics. Outside of the mainstream of physics, however, there are some workers who are beginning to re-evaluate Catt's ideas on the transmission-line representation of the capacitor in order to achieve better modelling of these components. His ideas on displacement current, electric charge, electric current, etc. still have not been accepted by mainstream workers.
Catt's view that electrons do not carry electrical charge seems to be inconsistent with the well-observed physics of the operation of such devices as the space charge limited operation of Vacuum tubes or ion engines, the MOS field-effect transistor, the CCD array or even the Cathode Ray Tube, or more modern devices such as Single-electron transistors, all of which seem to be operate perfectly well using physical principles that Catt discards.
[edit] Catt's associates/ supporters
- Dr. D.S. Walton
- Dr. Arnold Lynch
- Mr. Malcolm Davidson
[edit] Publications and references
[edit] Articles
- Displacement current and how to get rid of it ("how to get rid of it" was put in without Catt's knowledge or consent by Wireless World editor Ivall)
- The history of displacement current. Catt, Walton and Davidson, Wireless World, March 1979
- The death of electric current (Catt shows that Heaviside energy current carries the energy of electricity, and at light speeds it sets up the field for subsequent electron drift)
- The Catt Anomaly
- Maxwell's equations revisited - A critique of orthodox electromagnetic theory, Wireless World, March 1980, pp78,78
[edit] Learned Society presented papers
- A Difficulty in Electromagnetic Theory By Dr Arnold Lynch and Mr Ivor Catt Presented to, and Published by, the Institution of Electrical Engineers, Professional Group D7 (History of Technology), 26th Weekend Meeting, 10-12 July 1998, University of East Anglia, publication HEE/26:
- I. Catt, 'Crosstalk (Noise) in Digital Systems,' in IEEE Trans. on Elect. Comp., vol. EC-16 (Dec 1967) pp749-58. Also papers proving that the inductor and transformer are really transmission lines like capacitors, published in Proc. IEE, June 83 & June 87
[edit] See also
- Twin capacitor paradox
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