Question for Classical Electrodynamics 2010.

 

Questions for Classical Electrodynamics 2010.

Ivor Catt. 20 March 2010

 

 

About classical electrodynamics

The 109 Experiment

Fifty Years of Electromagnetic Theory

About Classical Electrodynamics

The four major problems are;

Displacement Current.

The Catt Question.

Faraday's Law.

Pictures deriving from Crosstalk Theory.

 

1.

Displacement Current.

 

This paper points out an oversight which has continued for a century. This is discussed in my article at http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/41.htm

 

Displacement Current.

Our article in December 1978 pointed out that electric charge entering the plate of a capacitor did not immediately desire to traverse the space between the capacitor plates. (Bleaney is wrong when (s)he writes that the field between the plates is uniform.) After entering the capacitor plate from the input wire, the charge first has to spread itself across the plate. Only then can it express a desire to traverse the space between the plates.

This desire led to "Maxwell's leap of genius", Displacement Current. Maxwell himself, and all those who followed him and worshipped him, failed to notice that after entering the capacitor plate from the input wire, the charge had first to spread itself across the plate. This intermediate step has been ignored by all text books and lecturers. Since we pointed it out in December 1978 , it has been ignored for a further quarter century. All of today's text books are written as though this problem, of charge spreading out across the plate, remains unnoticed, like the Emperor's nakedness.

 

The spreading out of electric charge across the capacitor plate is real electric current, and must cause real magnetic field, according to Ampere's Rule or the Biot-Savart Law. The alleged genius of Maxwell was that the notional electric current, called by Maxwell "Displacement Current", was invented to produce magnetic field and so lead to key conclusions. Since the key (and only) purpose of Displacement Current is to cause magnetic field, it is unacceptable that there continues to be no discussion of the magnetic field which must be caused by the much more real electric current as the electric charge spreads out across the plate from the incoming wire.

 

The archetype for this kind of myopia is Professor W H G Lewin.  His lectures, including that on Displacement Current, are celebrated worldwide. He has been given prizes for lecturing excellence. Looking at his lecture, we can learn a great deal. Early on he draws a uniform electric field in the capacitor, but later on he says; “There is also a current going up on these plates .... “. He draws an electric current travelling along the capacitor plate at right angles to the horizontal current, which means that the horizontal electric field in the capacitor cannot be uniform. He refuses to discuss with me the magnetic field generated by this electric current. (Compare with Walter still makes time to reply to every single e-mail he gets from his internet fans .) However, he gets closer than other luminaries to the crisis we pointed out in December 1978 . No other lecturer or text book writer (including Heaviside) admits, or notices, that there is such a sideways current flow. Two other things are notable in his lecture. First is the bemused look on the faces of the students. Second, we see the arcane mathematics which causes this bemusement, and convinces the students that they are not capable of becoming expert in the subject. Of course, his mathematics is not as Byzantine as that in Wikipedia and elsewhere.

 

2.

 

The Catt Question.

When a TEM Step travels down a coaxial cable at the speed of light for the dielectric, negative charge must accumulate on the bottom conductor to terminate the electric field. That charge cannot reach the required point in time.

 

3.

 

Faraday's Law.

In Faraday’s famous experiment, a TEM step enters the primary of the transformer. When it has reached half way across the transformer, the change in magnetic field in the primary should cause a voltage to be registered to the far right in the voltmeter, but it measures no voltage because no signal has yet reached it.

 

4.

 

Pictures deriving from Crosstalk Theory.

I have only just realised that the Pictures deriving from experiment show that there can be two distinct electric fields and two distinct magnetic fields, that is, two energy currents, at one point in space at the same instant of time, which defies Faraday’s Law.

He agre

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Crosstalk (Noise) in Digital Systems

Pages 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , some of which is in two of my books. The argument starts at page 30 of one book , and at page 4 of the other book , continuing on page 55 . Here in figure 9.2 we see “a very narrow pulse introduced at the front end of the active line. If there were no parallel passive line nearby, this pulse would travel down the active line (at the speed of light for the dielectric) more or less unchanged,” in a TEM mode. “However, as the other two traces show, the presence of the passive line caused the original narrow pulse to break up into two similar pulses.”

He agre

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The Role of the Luminary

How do “Questions for Classical Electrodynamics” appear to accredited luminaries – Professors of Electronics, text book writers, journal referees and the like? The challenge they face is formidable. They are deeply immersed in a number of red herrings;

 

Wave-Particle dualism is the Kiss of Death to an attempt to grasp the discussion. Particles have to be removed from our consciousness.

 

A major barrier to their grasping the real subject is the wrong theory for a TEM Wave , "The Rolling Wave" , which we can be sure all of them adhere to. This makes it extremely hard for them to grasp the idea that the same amount of energy is travelling through the red square and the blue square in the diagram. In fact, they do not even know the diagram. I found it in only one text book fifty years ago, and cannot find it on the www. They might well know the pattern made by iron filings above a magnet, but this does not mean that they are familiar with curvilinear squares , and their association with the Poynting Vector. Wikipedia does not have the diagram, and neither do other www pages on “The Poynting Vector”. Familiarity with the diagram is necessary. I have only recently realised that this field pattern is not available to a professor or text book writer. Lacking that picture, and also thinking that E causes H causes E "The Rolling Wave" , it is almost impossible for them to think clearly about the second, third and fourth Questions above.

 

The idea that a TEM Wave must be sinusoidal is pervasive. To confirm this, do a Google search for “TEM Wave” or “Transverse Electromagnetic Wave”. If a sine wave is imposed on any of the above four Questions, it submerges the Question in confusion. Of course, it is difficult to see how a non-sinusoidal TEM Wave could propagate according to "The Rolling Wave" theory. That is, "The Rolling Wave" excludes the possibility that one logic gate can communicate with the next! Classical Electrodynamics doggedly ignores digital electronics, which is more than 95% of electronics today.