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https://www.jstor.org/stable/3609288?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents “For purposes which shall be
nameless”
A Mathematical Rake’s
Progress
By
Ivor Catt, Electronics & Wireless World, jan86. http://www.ivorcatt.com/em_test04.htm Ivor Catt looks back on how
he nearly became a maths addict
In
my article of last November ,
I showed that Maxwell’s Equations, so long thought to contain the heart and
essence of electromagnetism, told us virtually nothing about the subject.
Then, in my December article, I discussed the academic mafia’s vested
interest in knowledge. Here I try to discover who this group of charlatans,
the maths pushers, are. (The Shorter Oxford Dictionary entry
for this word is particularly apt: Charlatan 1. A mountebank who descants
volubly in the street; esp. an itinerant vendor of drugs, etc…. 2. An empiric
who pretends to wonderful knowledge or secrets …. A quack.) How does a young student
grow up to become part of the social groups who live by mathematical nonsense
like Maxwell’s Equations, and who conspire to prevent the development of a
scientific subject in a proper, physical, way? Concern
about this question led me to look back on my own education. What pressures
were exerted on me to become a mathematical rake? My experience indicates that the slide is similar to that of the drug addict – a number of small, apparently innocuous, slips downward, culminating in total separation from reality. As we progress through school and college, we are fed a series of potions, each more heady than the last. The
process started with the calculus. My introduction to it, at the age of 15,
was worrying and disorienting. It was part of the great disaster which I
thought had overtaken me in my first few months in the sixth form. Whereas I
had always been good at maths, I found the first few months in the sixth for
confusing. Even though Sam Richardson was a very good teacher, and I had help
from my mother, a brilliant mathematician, at home, I couldn’t understand the
basis of what we were learning in mathematics, particularly the calculus. This
was a new experience for me. Previously, I had always found maths easy, and
scored high marks. Now, suddenly, it was different. This was serious, because
if I tried to retreat from maths into some other field, all nearby subjects were
based on maths anyway. There seemed to be no escape from my new-found
inadequacy in mathematics. As the first half-year exams approached I became
more and more worried, because I still couldn’t grasp the basis of what I was
being taught. The
flaw in the calculus package is what I now recognise as the reductionist
fallacy; a misconception which underlies and undermines western philosophy. (Titus,
H., Living Issues in Philosophy,
American Book Company 1964, pp148, 527, 540 etc.) The error is to think that
‘the whole is the sum of the parts’, no more; that lots of bits of string are
quite as useful (and the same thing as) a long piece of string. Putting it
another way, the problem of discontinuities was ignored. I was right to
worry. [ What finished me
off for mathematics was my brilliant teacher Sam Richardson’s enthusiasm for “The
nine points circle. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/3609288?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
”. Later I got a State Scholarship in mathematics, but didn’t mean to spend
my life on useless trivia. So in College I went down market to Engineering,
something socially useful. I ended up in the most mathematical part of
engineering, electromagnetic theory. Then the mathematicians hijacked it, and
buried it in grotesque mathematics. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/Oppo_complete.pdf –
Ivor Catt May 2018 ] A
whole array of misleading, damaging concepts slipped in with I, or j as we
electrical engineers call it. “Two for the price of one”; if a + jb = c + jd, then a = c and b =
d; so we can do two jobs at once. Pretty, but a delusion, similar to the
illusion that we can drive better after drinking, and for the same reason –
our vision is blurred. Hot
on the tail of j came that awful array of cons under
the appropriate descriptor ‘sin’. I shall not develop this theme fully, but
only repeat that one FRS [Howie] went so far as to say [to
me] that
“Physical reality is composed of sine waves”. In fact, the sinusoidal wave,
which is a camouflaged circle, is Ptolemy’s pure, circular epicycles fighting
back against Kepler’s less pure, more real, ellipse. Kepler, who himself
loved the idea of the ‘harmony of the spheres’, saw a more pure ‘equal areas
in equal time’ rather than a distinctly un-heavenly, earthy, (we would say
‘real’,) ellipse. The
Wireless World July 1981
editorial, ‘The decline of the philosophical spirit’, contrasts the nineteenth
century, when scientists were interested in and capable of distinguishing
between the physical real and the mere mathematical construct, and today,
when scientists no longer care about the difference, and have even developed
a philosophy of science which confuses them (Popper K., Conjectures and Refutations, R.K.P.,
1963, p100.) An example of the destructive effect of sine is the way in which it suddenly appears, unannounced and without justification, on the second page of a text book discussion of the TEM Wave. In
the event, my first half-year exams in the sixth form didn’t seem too hard,
and I felt that I must have scored over 50%, which would give me a breathing
space in which to re-plan my future. To my astonishment, I learned that I had
scored 99% and 92%. However
much I might think I didn’t
understand what was going on in maths, the marks I scored ‘proved’ otherwise.
My high scores told me that I was
still good at maths, as I had always been. However, the nagging suspicion
remained with me that something was amiss. I doubted whether I could really
have misjudged the situation so badly. Today, I believe that I was correctly
judging the situation, and it was my exam marks that were wrong. I was being
brainwashed into the belief that understanding was unnecessary, even
impossible’ that success meant the ability to manipulate the symbolism of the
subject, not to understand it. I was being encouraged, the initial carrot
being high exam marks, to turn the handle of the mathematical barrel-organ,
and not to ask too may awkward questions. I
seemed to learn my lesson, and later on, when taking A-levels, I gained a
State Scholarship in maths although only 17 years old. This was a remarkable
achievement, and should have secured my loyalty to the administrators of the
mathematical myth. However, I was already questioning the usefulness of some
of this maths, particularly the interminable geometry (since dropped) in the
Cambridge Open exam, and so at Cambridge I decided to leave my strong
subject, maths, and read engineering. (I love the Heaviside
remark; “Whether good mathematicians, when they die, go to Cambridge, I do
not know.” – Heaviside O., Electromagnetic Theory, vol. 3, Dover, 1950. (first published 1903.) My background must have
made me particularly sceptical. My mother had scooped the lot, gaining the
top ‘first’ [= the Lubbock Prize] in maths in London
University [Enid Jones 1924], but the payoff to her [or
to anyone else] in benefits in later years proved minimal. The
next piece of blatant brainwashing occurred during my engineering course in
Cambridge. We had a lot of thermodynamics, which was very mathematical. One
day I asked my tutor, [the renowned] Professor Binnie, what
practical interpretation I could place upon an equation containing a collage
of terms involving the three e’s – energy, enthalpy and entropy. His answer
was that I should not bother to look for a physical interpretation, but
should merely regard it as a piece of algebra to be manipulated according to
the rules of algebra. I was shocked by this, and I remain shocked today. Had
I left maths and taken up engineering for nothing? Whereas
drawing, or draughting, was strong in the Cambridge
Engineering Faculty and seemed to occupy a large part of our time, being the
only subject you were not allowed to fail, electricity was weak, rating only
one lecture a week, or at most two. One suspects that conservative Cambridge
of the 1950s hoped that this new-fangled electricity thing would prove a
flash in the pan, and go away soon. (Gaslight, I have been told, was very
pleasant; much softer on the eye than electric light.) We
did not cover Laplace Transform, and this set me apart from upstart graduates
from redbrick universities, who enjoyed discovering how backward Cambridge
was. I was lucky in this omission, because I now feel that transforming is
one of the destructive mathematical techniques in engineering that increases
the divorce from reality, and which is the legacy to engineers from
mathematicians. Whereas to me it was obvious from first principles that to
get a constant current through a capacitor you need a continually increasing
voltage, I recently found that for a student of Laplace this is the
conclusion of a lengthy piece of complex calculation. Thus
was the stage set for Maxwell's
Equations , that phoney apology for electromagnetic theory, which held
sway for a century and so befogged the subject. There
is a similarity between the maths pushers and drug pushers. Both entice the
victim with promises of Elysium. Both gradually increase the dose. In both
cases, there is nothing at the end of the rainbow. http://www.ivorcatt.com/em_test04.htm |
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"From a
long view of the history of mankind – seen from, say, ten thousand years from
now – there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th
century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics.
The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison
with this important scientific event of the same decade." – R.P.
Feynman, R.B. Leighton, and M. Sands, Feynman
Lectures on Physics, vol. 2, Addison-Wesley, London, 1964, c. 1,
p. 11. Oops! – Ivor Catt |
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@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ “The rhetoric of
the natural philosophers of Maxwells
time make the Equations more mnemonic than insightful. The insights are
contained in the surrounding texts. I have always
found Maxwell’s derivation of the bell shaped curve quite odd
. It makes sense only as a shorthand for his
explanation of his idea. Now when you are
taught as I was that Mathis is the language of nature, you necessarily are
duped into thinking there is more in the manipulation of symbols than you can
observe with your own eyes. This however has never been the case, nor will it
ever be. Mnemonic aids at best, pure obscurantism most of the time is the
true nature of mathematical symbology.” – Sam Gray.
February 2013 |