Reasons
for the butchery of “Conflation”
3
*Response to Dr.
Catt***************
We confirm
our explanations of “The Catt Question” published in IEEE AP Magazine (Vol. 54,
No. 6, pp. 242-244, December 2012) and Physical Education (Vol. 48, No.6, p.
718, 2013). There may be differing or opposing opinions; we do not see a
problem if such differences exist as long as they are backed by scientific
justification. Practice of Science is not based on the principle of authority,
but on plausibility of argumentations, experimental evidence, and on the consensus of the scientific community expressed
by the peer-review process. Dr. Catt disputes the mathematical
explanation we provided, naming it “arcane” and asking to focus on the “stark
reality,” but quantitative analyses, based on experimentally verified and
generally accepted mathematical theories, is indeed the main tool we have to
understand reality, as the last five centuries of scientific achievements have
largely demonstrated.
M. Pieraccini
and S. Selleri DINFO – University of
Florence, Italy 20 May 2015
The above was a reply to 2 "Conflation" , my
answer to their article 1 "Catt's
Anomaly" . I had been given the opportunity to reply, as promised in
the Code of
Ethics 2 of the journal of
the IEEE.
My comment was butchered by Professor Giuseppe
Pelosi, the Associate Editor of the journal, who is the authors’ colleague in
Florence University. He removed the following paragraph from my "Conflation" ;
Catt had
published extensively in IEEE journals up to 1967. (The Italians call Catt “an
engineer and amateur scientist”. Giuseppe Pelosi, Associate Editor, says Catt
is “moving outside of academia and structured research”.) Then, apart from two
short pieces in ProcIEEE in the 1980s, he was totally rejected
for publication by all peer reviewed journals throughout the world for the next
50 years, both for his own theories and for his
questions about classical theory. For more than ten years, no student in the
world would take up Catt’s published offer of £500 to
the first student who asked his expert lecturer to write something about “The
Catt Question”. During those 50 years he was massively published in non-peer
reviewed journals, for instance every month for ten years in Wireless World, circulation then 60,000 – a total of six million
issues.
Here Pelosi contravened calases 2, 7 and
9 of his IEEE Code of Ethics
2 . Note that Pelosi edited
(altered) something 2 "Conflation"
to which the authors had already replied 3. So now they reply to something which does not
exist. Pelosi was concealing the gaffe of M. Pieraccini and S. Selleri 3 when they said the
only permissible discourse had to be peer reviewed. They had published an
article "Catt's Anomaly" about
an “Anomaly”, or actually a Question
, which had been blocked by Peer Review for 30 years, but published extensively
in non-Peer Reviewed journals. A Peer Reviewed article “answered” a Question
which was not allowed to exist in Peer Reviewed literature
Caton “ .... and peer review would purge his best ideas.”
Ivor Catt 9 February 2017