Ivor Catt
Encyclopedia
Ivor Catt 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.
and grew up on an RAF airbase in Singapore
. 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.
in 1981, after his articles on the topic were rejected by academic journals. The technique, christened Catt Spiral, was designed to enable the use of partially faulty integrated chips (called partials), which were otherwise discarded by manufacturers.
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. 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. Anamartic introduced a solid-state memory, called the Wafer Stack, based on the technology in 1989 and the device won Electronic Products ‘Product of the Year Award’. However the company could not ensure a large enough supply of silicon wafers, which were crucial for its chip manufacturing, and folded in 1992. In the following years, other companies including Memory Corporation and Syntaq tried to revive and further develop Catt's ideas on WSI.
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.
describing it as a contrived and often muddled work that rested on "one man's bitter and limited experience."
s 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. Catt discusses his views on the issue in his self-published book, The Hook and the Sting: The Legal Mafia.
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 http://www.ivorcatt.com/3ew.htm. The New Scientist on 19 February 1989 stated that Catt proposed an electronic internet to share ideas and circumvent bigoted censorship http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12416924.800-forum-on-the-importance-of-being-creative--innovativethinkers-should-be-allowed-to-come-to-the-fore-.html:
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.
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
electronics
Electronics
Electronics is the branch of science, engineering and technology that deals with electrical circuits involving active electrical components such as vacuum tubes, transistors, diodes and integrated circuits, and associated passive interconnection technologies...
engineer
Engineer
An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics and ingenuity to develop solutions for technical problems. Engineers design materials, structures, machines and systems while considering the limitations imposed by practicality,...
known principally for his alternative theories of electromagnetism
Electromagnetism
Electromagnetism is one of the four fundamental interactions in nature. The other three are the strong interaction, the weak interaction and gravitation...
. He received a B.A. degree from Cambridge University, and has won two major product awards for his innovative computer chip designs.
Biography
Ivor Catt was born in EnglandEngland
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
and grew up on an RAF airbase in Singapore
Singapore
Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...
. He left the country, along with his mother and sister, just before the Japanese invasion
Battle of Singapore
The Battle of Singapore was fought in the South-East Asian theatre of the Second World War when the Empire of Japan invaded the Allied stronghold of Singapore. Singapore was the major British military base in Southeast Asia and nicknamed the "Gibraltar of the East"...
in 1942. He did his National Service stationed in Germany. He won a scholarship to read mathematics at Trinity College
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 170 Fellows...
, Cambridge University, but transferred to engineering.
Wafer scale integration
Catt developed and patented some ideas on Wafer scale integration (WSI) in 1972, and published his work in Wireless WorldWireless World
Wireless World was the pre-eminent British magazine for radio and electronics enthusiasts. It was one of the very few "informal" journals which were tolerated as a professional expense.- History :...
in 1981, after his articles on the topic were rejected by academic journals. The technique, christened Catt Spiral, was designed to enable the use of partially faulty integrated chips (called partials), which were otherwise discarded by manufacturers.
In mid-1980s, a British company Anamartic, funded by Tandem Computers
Tandem Computers
Tandem Computers, Inc. was the dominant manufacturer of fault-tolerant computer systems for ATM networks, banks, stock exchanges, telephone switching centers, and other similar commercial transaction processing applications requiring maximum uptime and zero data loss. The company was founded in...
and Sir Clive Sinclair
Clive Sinclair
Sir Clive Marles Sinclair is a British entrepreneur and inventor, most commonly known for his work in consumer electronics in the late 1970s and early 1980s....
among others, announced plans to manufacture microchips ("superchips") based on Catt's technology. 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. Anamartic introduced a solid-state memory, called the Wafer Stack, based on the technology in 1989 and the device won Electronic Products ‘Product of the Year Award’. However the company could not ensure a large enough supply of silicon wafers, which were crucial for its chip manufacturing, and folded in 1992. In the following years, other companies including Memory Corporation and Syntaq tried to revive and further develop Catt's ideas on WSI.
On electromagnetism
Catt argues that much of mainstream electromagnetism is wrong: Catt does not entertain the existence of electric chargeElectric charge
Electric charge is a physical property of matter that causes it to experience a force when near other electrically charged matter. Electric charge comes in two types, called positive and negative. Two positively charged substances, or objects, experience a mutual repulsive force, as do two...
as a fundamental entity and he claims that all charge is composed of trapped Heaviside energy current
Energy current
Energy current is a flow of energy defined by the Poynting vector , as opposed to normal current . It was originally postulated by Oliver Heaviside.- Explanation :...
. He argues that capacitance
Capacitance
In electromagnetism and electronics, capacitance is the ability of a capacitor to store energy in an electric field. Capacitance is also a measure of the amount of electric potential energy stored for a given electric potential. A common form of energy storage device is a parallel-plate capacitor...
and inductance
Inductance
In electromagnetism and electronics, inductance is the ability of an inductor to store energy in a magnetic field. Inductors generate an opposing voltage proportional to the rate of change in current in a circuit...
are fictional, being artifacts of the transmission-line nature of the devices; that displacement current
Displacement current
In electromagnetism, displacement current is a quantity that is defined in terms of the rate of change of electric displacement field. Displacement current has the units of electric current density, and it has an associated magnetic field just as actual currents do. However it is not an electric...
is not needed to explain capacitor operation. As opposed to normal electric current
Electric current
Electric current is a flow of electric charge through a medium.This charge is typically carried by moving electrons in a conductor such as wire...
(flow of charge), Catt uses energy current
Energy current
Energy current is a flow of energy defined by the Poynting vector , as opposed to normal current . It was originally postulated by Oliver Heaviside.- Explanation :...
to describe most effects.
Catt illustrates this with the "Catt anomaly". When a step
Heaviside step function
The Heaviside step function, or the unit step function, usually denoted by H , is a discontinuous function whose value is zero for negative argument and one for positive argument....
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
Electric field
In physics, an electric field surrounds electrically charged particles and time-varying magnetic fields. The electric field depicts the force exerted on other electrically charged objects by the electrically charged particle the field is surrounding...
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.
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. The book got largely negative reviews, with Kirkus ReviewsKirkus Reviews
Kirkus Reviews is an American book review magazine founded in 1933 by Virginia Kirkus . Kirkus serves the book and literary trade sector, including libraries, publishers, literary and film agents, film and TV producers and booksellers. Kirkus Reviews is published on the first and 15th of each month...
describing it as a contrived and often muddled work that rested on "one man's bitter and limited experience."
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 feministRadical feminism
Radical feminism is a current theoretical perspective within feminism that focuses on the theory of patriarchy as a system of power that organizes society into a complex of relationships based on an assumption that "male supremacy" oppresses women...
s and anti-social women of causing the disintegration of the justice system and reducing divorced fathers to helots
Helots
The helots: / Heílôtes) were an unfree population group that formed the main population of Laconia and the whole of Messenia . Their exact status was already disputed in antiquity: according to Critias, they were "especially slaves" whereas to Pollux, they occupied a status "between free men and...
, through their control of the media and the courts. Catt discusses his views on the issue in his self-published book, The Hook and the Sting: The Legal Mafia.
Current status of Catt's ideas
Catt's paper 'Crosstalk (Noise) in Digital Systems,' in IEEE Trans. on Elect. Comp., vol. EC-16 (Dec 1967) pp. 749–58 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4039191 has so far received 44 scholarly citations http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cites=7347728401648293569, while two other popular papers written by Ivor Catt received 88 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cites=15905607118324963335 and 28 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cites=13335691372789325884 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
Falklands War
The Falklands War , also called the Falklands Conflict or Falklands Crisis, was fought in 1982 between Argentina and the United Kingdom over the disputed Falkland Islands and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands...
, the British warship HMS Sheffield
HMS Sheffield (D80)
HMS Sheffield was the second Royal Navy ship to be named after the city of Sheffield in Yorkshire. She was a Type 42 Guided Missile Destroyer laid down by Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering at Barrow-in-Furness on 15 January 1970, launched on 10 June 1971 and commissioned on 16 February 1975.An...
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 http://www.ivorcatt.com/3ew.htm. The New Scientist on 19 February 1989 stated that Catt proposed an electronic internet to share ideas and circumvent bigoted censorship http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12416924.800-forum-on-the-importance-of-being-creative--innovativethinkers-should-be-allowed-to-come-to-the-fore-.html:
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.
Books
- The Catt Concept: The New Industrial Darwinism , Putnam, 1971, ISBN 0906340152
- Computer Worship, Pitman Publ., 1973 ISBN 0273002430
- Digital Hardware Design (with David Walton, Malcolm Davidson), Macmillan, 1979, ISBN 0333259815
Self-Published
- Electromagnetic Theory, C.A.M. Pub., 1983, ISBN 0906340039
- Death of Electric Current: Wireless World Articles and Letters, C.A.M. Pub., 1987, ISBN 0906340063
- The Catt Anomaly: Science Beyond the Crossroads, Westfields, 2001, ISBN 0906340152
- The Hook and the Sting: The Legal Mafia, Westfields, 1996, 1996, ISBN 0906340098
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 http://www.iee.org/oncomms/pn/history/hot_conf_index.pdf
- 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 http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/ipub002a.htm
- 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 (Dec 1967) pp. 749–58 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4039191.
Articles Referring to Ivor Catt
- Cook, Nigel, "Air traffic control: how many more air disasters?", Electronics World, January 2003, pp. 12–17 http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOhGrO7zi4Y
- Firth, Howard, "Forum: On the importance of being creative - Innovative thinkers should be allowed to come to the fore", New Scientist, 25 November 1989 http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12416924.800-forum-on-the-importance-of-being-creative--innovativethinkers-should-be-allowed-to-come-to-the-fore-.html
- Sinclair, Sir Clive, "Sir Clive Sinclair talks on wafer-scale integration 1987", YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7JYZviFH54