Ivor Catt

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.

Biography

Ivor Catt was born in England and grew up on an RAF airbase in Singapore. He left the country, along with his mother, 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.

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. 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 Product's ‘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.

Writings and opinions

On electromagnetism

Catt argues that much of mainstream electromagnetism is wrong: Catt does not admit 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 transmission-line effects in 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, but states that simply asking the question proves 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.

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 Reviews describing it as a contrived and often muddled work that rested on "one man's bitter and limited experience." However, the Catt Concept was used in the following May 1970 Editorial in Popular Mechanics to explain the reason why the NASA budget was cut after the success of Apollo, while the Vietnam War budget was increased after failure:

‘The President put his name on the plaque Armstrong and Aldrin left on the moon and he telephoned them while they were there, but he cut America’s space budget to the smallest total since John Glenn orbited the Earth. The Vice-President says on to Mars by 1985, but we won’t make it by “stretching out” our effort. Perhaps NASA was too successful with Apollo. It violated the “Catt Concept”, enunciated by Britisher Ivor Catt. According to Catt, the most secure project is the unsuccessful one, because it lasts the longest.’ [[1]]

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. 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 [2] has so far received 44 scholarly citations [3], while two other popular papers written by Ivor Catt received 88 [4] and 28 [5] scholarly citations, respectively.

Catt also claimed disastrous consequences of what he calls censorship (by which he means, scientific journals ignoring his theories) 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 [6]. The New Scientist on 19 February 1989 stated that Catt proposed an electronic internet to share ideas and circumvent bigoted censorship [7]:

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.

Selected bibliography

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 [8]
• 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 [9]
• 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 [10].

Articles Referring to Ivor Catt

• Cook, Nigel, "Air traffic control: how many more air disasters?", Electronics World, January 2003, pp. 12–17 [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]

External links

• Ivor Catt's latest website, with 1970s books and articles
• Ivor Catt's earlier website
• The Catt Anomaly
• Air Traffic Control report