Wikipedia on Ivor Catt, 14 September 2012.

“Catt has no experimental evidence to confirm or deny the theories he has questioned, so his ideas must be regarded as speculative only. On the other hand the existence of the modern world of electronics provides abundant evidence that he is wrong.” – see below.

Ivor Catt

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Ivor Catt (born 1935) is a British electronics engineer known principally for his alternative theories of electromagnetism. He received a B.A. degree from Cambridge University, and has won two major product awards for his innovative computer chip designs.

Contents

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[edit] Biography

Ivor Catt was born in England and grew up on an RAF airbase in Singapore.^[1] He left the country, along with his mother and sister, just before the Japanese invasion in 1942. He did his National Service stationed in Germany. He won a scholarship to read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge University, but transferred to engineering.

[edit] Wafer scale integration

Catt developed and patented some ideas on Wafer scale integration (WSI) in 1972, and published his work in Wireless World in 1981, after his articles on the topic were rejected by academic journals.^[2] The technique, christened Catt Spiral, was designed to enable the use of partially faulty integrated chips (called partials), which were otherwise discarded by manufacturers.^[3][4]

In mid-1980s, a British company Anamartic, funded by Tandem Computers and Sir Clive Sinclair among others, announced plans to manufacture microchips ("superchips") based on Catt's technology.^[3][5] The approach was reported to be revolutionary at the time, with predictions that it would enable construction of powerful super-computers from cheap, mass produced components, and cheaper and faster replacements for magnetic disk memories.^[3][6] Anamartic introduced a solid-state memory, called the Wafer Stack, based on the technology in 1989 and the device won Electronic Product's ‘Product of the Year Award’.^[4] However the company could not ensure a large enough supply of silicon wafers, which were crucial for its chip manufacturing, and folded in 1992.^[7] In the following years, other companies including Memory Corporation and Syntaq tried to revive and further develop Catt's ideas on WSI.^[7]

[edit] Writings and opinions

[edit] On electromagnetism

Catt argues that much of mainstream electromagnetism is wrong: Catt does not entertain the existence of electric charge as a fundamental entity and he claims that all charge is composed of trapped Heaviside energy current. He argues that capacitance and inductance are fictional, being artifacts of the transmission-line nature of the devices; that displacement current is not needed to explain capacitor operation. As opposed to normal electric current (flow of charge), Catt uses energy current to describe most effects.

Catt illustrates this with the "Catt anomaly". When a step electromagnetic wave travels from left to right in a parallel twin-conductor transmission line, he asks, "Where does the charge on the bottom (return) conductor come from?" He does not answer that question himself, but uses conflicts in others' responses to conclude that conventional electrodynamics must be false. 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 has no experimental evidence to confirm or deny the theories he has questioned, so his ideas must be regarded as speculative only. On the other hand the existence of the modern world of electronics provides abundant evidence that he is wrong.

[edit] On industrial management

Catt spent six years in the 1960s working in five different electronic companies in the USA. He was very disillusioned by his experience and wrote a harsh critique of American management practices in his book, The Catt Concept: The New Industrial Darwinism. Catt was critical of the hire and fire culture, which he labeled the New Social Darwinism, and accused American employers of stifling their workers' creativity.^[8] The book got largely negative reviews, with Kirkus Reviews describing it as a contrived and often muddled work that rested on "one man's bitter and limited experience."^[9]

[edit] On the English justice system

In Catt's view the English justice system is heading to a collapse. He assigns the blame to Lord Denning, who according to Catt replaced the rule of law by desire for equity, ethics and righteousness. Catt also accuses radical feminists and anti-social women of causing the disintegration of the justice system and reducing divorced fathers to helots, through their control of the media and the courts.^[10][11][12] Catt discusses his views on the issue in his self-published book, The Hook and the Sting: The Legal Mafia.

[edit] Current status of Catt's ideas

Catt's paper 'Crosstalk (Noise) in Digital Systems,' in IEEE Trans. on Elect. Comp., vol. EC-16 (December 1967) pp. 749–58 [1] has so far received 44 scholarly citations [2], while two other popular papers written by Ivor Catt received 88 [3] and 28 [4] scholarly citations, respectively.

Catt also claimed disastrous consequences of what he calls censorship (by which he means, scientific journals declining to publish his papers) in an article 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.

His work has received coverage and debate in the magazines Wireless World and Electronics World from December 1978 to September 1988, also see [5]. The New Scientist on 19 February 1989 stated that Catt proposed an electronic internet to share ideas and circumvent bigoted censorship [6]:

Catt argues that as bodies of knowledge grow, they become stronger in keeping out any new items of knowledge that appear to question the fundamental base of the established knowledge and its practitioners. To assist the propagation of new ideas, he proposes the creation of an electronic information-sharing network.

[edit] Selected bibliography

[edit] Books

The Catt Concept: The New Industrial Darwinism, Putnam, 1971, ISBN 0-906340-15-2
Computer Worship, Pitman Publ., 1973 ISBN 0-273-00243-0
Digital Hardware Design (with David Walton, Malcolm Davidson), Macmillan, 1979, ISBN 0-333-25981-5

[edit] Self-Published

Electromagnetic Theory, C.A.M. Pub., 1983, ISBN 0-906340-03-9
Death of Electric Current: Wireless World Articles and Letters, C.A.M. Pub., 1987, ISBN 0-906340-06-3
The Catt Anomaly: Science Beyond the Crossroads, Westfields, 2001, ISBN 0-906340-15-2
The Hook and the Sting: The Legal Mafia, Westfields, 1996, 1996, ISBN 0-906340-09-8

[edit] Articles by Ivor Catt

Lynch, Arnold and Ivor Catt, "A Difficulty in Electromagnetic Theory," 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 [7]
Catt, I. The Two T.E.M. Signals, IEEE Computer Society, 1978, OCLC 35349268
Catt, I. "The Rise and Fall of Bodies of Knowledge", The Information Scientist, 12 (4) December 1978, pp. 137–144 [8]
Catt, I., Davidson, M., Walton, D.S.,"The history of displacement current," Wireless World, March 1979
Catt, I., Davidson, M., Walton, D.S., "Displacement current", Wireless World, December 1978
Catt, I., 'Crosstalk (Noise) in Digital Systems,' IEEE Trans. on Elect. Comp., vol. EC-16 (December 1967) pp. 749–58 [9].

[edit] Articles Referring to Ivor Catt

Cook, Nigel, "Air traffic control: how many more air disasters?", Electronics World, January 2003, pp. 12–17 [10] [11]
Firth, Howard, "Forum: On the importance of being creative - Innovative thinkers should be allowed to come to the fore", New Scientist, 25 November 1989 [12]
Sinclair, Sir Clive, "Sir Clive Sinclair talks on wafer-scale integration 1987", YouTube [13]

[edit] References

1. ^ http://www.ivorcatt.com/2951.htm , accessed 1 August 2007

2. ^ Schofield, Jack (16 February 1989). "Computer Guardian (Microfile): Catt's back". The Guardian.

3. ^ ^a ^b ^c Matthews, Robert (9 August 1988). "Breakthrough for British microchip; Anamartic; Wafer scale integration". The Times (London).

4. ^ ^a ^b Cook, Nigel (January 2003). "Air Traffic Control: How many more air disasters?". Electronics World. http://www.ivorcatt.com/3ew.htm. Retrieved 4 April 2008.

5. ^ BBC Micro Live News. British Broadcasting Corporation. 1985. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii0I2i_yWMc. Retrieved 4 April 2008.

6. ^ Matthews, Robert (9 February 1989). "A first for UK; Supercomputers; Technology". The Times (London).

7. ^ ^a ^b Morgan, Oliver; Day, Timon and Grant, Richard (8 October 1995). "Chip wars - Rival British world-beaters in battle for supremacy". Mail on Sunday, London.

8. ^ Catt, Ivor (1971). The Catt Concept: The New Industrial Darwinism. Putnam Publ.. ISBN 0-906340-15-2.

9. ^ "Review - The Catt Concept: The New Industrial Darwinism". Kirkus Reviews. 1 October 1971.

10. ^ Catt, Ivor (1996). The Hook and the Sting: The Legal Mafia. Westfields. ISBN 0-906340-09-8. http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/w92hs2.htm.

11. ^ Catt, Ivor (3 July 1994). "Bashing but no blood (letter to the editor)". The Sunday Times.

12. ^ Catt, Ivor (30 August 2004). "Popular justice (letter to the editor)". The Times.