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x [Nigel Cook
published on Ivor Catt's ideas in the aug02 issue of the London
"Electronics World" (was Wireless World), pp46-49.] [slomailed to
Moran, Gibson and Davidson.] The Single Velocity Universe
Some years
ago, Nigel Cook was right to jump onto my proposal of a single-velocity
universe as crucial. I suspect that almost everyone will desist from grasping
the idea, let alone disagreeing with it. However, those same people are
presumably happy to accept the extraordinary idea, as part of the kinetic theory
of heat, that the chair they are sitting on is vacillating at great speed.
However, they were taught the latter while toddlers, and so have become
accustomed to it. They are now too old and mature to address, let alone think
on, a new idea. I was fortunate in the
1960s to be hired into Motorola, Phoenix, Arizona, to work on the
interconnection of high speed logic. Motorola made faster (ECL) logic than
anyone else, and the delay through a logic gate was the same as the time it
took light to travel one foot. Signals all travelled at
the speed of light, no slower and no faster. Their distortion was
minimal. These facts were staring me in the face, and it would have
taken remarkable effort to evade the obvious fact, that electromagnetic
signals travelled at the speed of light. This speed, 300,000
Km/sec, could be calculated from the permittivity and the permeability
of the space through which the signals travelled. A sequence of signals
(pulses) launched one after the other remained in the right order, as do
the carriages in a train, as they travel, one after the other.
(Similarly, the segments of light hitting your face arrive in the same order
as they left the car headlight.) The idea that their order
might change would be as bizarre as the idea that the carriages in a high
speed train might somehow change their order, the third carriage arriving in
Edinburgh before the second. Thus, the idea of more than one velocity would
be bizarre. (Also, I derived this single velocity from Maxwell's Equations, of
which I do not now approve. I published the proof.) The high speed sampling
oscilloscope, attached to one point of a transmission line, would clearly see
the sequence of pulses passing. Reattached further down the transmission
line, it would see the same pulses delayed by the transition time between the
two probe points. I published such pictures in the IEEE in 1967. In order to make our
prototype scratchpad memory faster, and so beat Texas Instruments in a split
contract, my boss Emory Garth and I were anxious to get the signals to travel
inside the printed circuit boards at that speed in the memory system we
were developing. However, although the magnetic permeability was the best,
the permittivity of the epoxy glass through which the pulses travelled,
guided by two conductors, was higher, causing a drop in speed. Emory tried to
develop printed circuit boards which replaced the epoxy glass with
teflon, because its permittivity was better, but he failed. During this
work, it was clear that a universe composed of teflon instead of vacuum
would support electromagnetic signals which travelled slower than in vacuo,
but at a single, new speed of half a foot per second. [Note 1] The first, cheap pulse
generator which I used in my work was a Reed Relay Pulse Generator. I found
that, as the manufacturer's brochure said, the pulse outputted was twice as
long as one would expect. This led me to the conclusion that an apparently
steady charged capacitor was not steady at all. Far from having positive
charge loafing around on the top plate and negative charge on the bottom
plate, everything in the charged capacitor was travelling at the speed of
light. This is now called The Catt, or Contrapuntal, Model for a Charged
Capacitor. I published and republished this some decades ago. Whereas it had
been thought that in a capacitor there was stationary electromagnetism, we
now saw that it was travelling as the speed of light. The obvious question
arose. If so many things travelled at a single velocity, that of
light, including one case, the capacitor, when the velocity
was wrongly thought to be zero, should we consider the idea that
everything in the universe travelled at one speed, the speed of light. Was
any other velocity, including zero, illegal? Yes. Ivor
Catt. 31july02 Note 1 The Slow
Universe
When signals
travelled in a medium such as teflon, guided by two conductors, their
behaviour was more or less identical to signals travelling through a vacuum,
guided by two conductors. The only difference was that they travelled at a
single, slower speed. (The only other difference was that the ratio of E
field to H field was different, but fixed.) This was fine, and echoed the
ideas from centuries ago about the speed of light through glass. A problem arose with my
other postulate, that everything in the universe was composed of TEM Waves
(electromagnetic pulses). If that were true, then the teflon, or the glass,
must be composed of the same TEM Waves that were travelling through the
teflon or glass at a reduced velocity. I resolved
this dilemma by proposing that a TEM wave, when travelling through a region
composed of trapped TEM Waves (i.e. a crystal), followed an eccentric path,
either zig-zag (Leopard Space) or like the man climbing the greasy pole, two
steps forward, one step back, two steps forward (Zebra Space). Both of these
proposals, particularly the latter, are supported by the fact that a slower
medium tends to cause more dispersion (distortion). Ivor
Catt 31july02 Caroline, rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. In his book "Personal
Knowledge", pub. RKP 1958/73, Michael Polanyi is obviously discussing
the problems faced by Caroline when she addresses paradigm change. T S Kuhn,
in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", pub. Univ.
of Chicago Press 1962/70, says that Caroline and I talk through each other
(pp 148, 132 and 109). (In his Postscript - 1969, p174, Kuhn was naughty
to not cite Polanyi, ten years previously, whom he would have heard about by
then. On p151, Polanyi already had Kuhn's key concept of the paradigm
and paradigm change, which is what Kuhn is now famous for, not Polanyi.)
Reading their writings, it becomes clear that my ideas are revolutionary, and
also that to apply conventional analysis (normal science analysis) to them is
futile. What my revolutionary
predecessors failed to do was to comprehensively destroy the theory they were
trying to replace. This was my achievement with "The Catt Anomaly".
Anyone resisting my theories is not in a position to cleave to what went
before, because that is dead. No one in the world will come forward to defend
the classical electromagnetic theory, destroyed by The Catt Anomaly, which
should have been called The Catt Question. It is not true, as Caroline
would have it, that my attack on classical electromagnetism is just one of
many, for instance her own. One can distinguish between an attack on the
superstructure of Modern Physics, which is her role, and The Catt Anomaly,
which goes to the foundations of twentieth century physics including Modern
Physics. The TEM Wave travelling down a coaxial cable arose in around
1870, half a century before the bells and whistles of Modern Physics
that such as Caroline joust with. Those who built up 20th century physics
said that they were building on the electromagnetic theory of Faraday,
Maxwell and Heaviside, which is the era attacked by "The Catt
Anomaly". All the 20th century Quantum and Uncertainty silliness came
much later, but it all depended on what I attack. Ivor
Catt 31july02 |
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