TEM wave electron model

‘It had been an audacious idea that particles as small as electrons could have spin and, indeed, quite a lot of it. … the "surface of the electron" would have to move 137 times as fast as the speed of light. Nowadays such objections are simply ignored.’ – Professor Gerard t’Hooft, ‘In Search of the Ultimate Building Blocks’, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p27.

‘(a) Energy current can only enter the capacitor at the speed of light.

‘(b) Once inside, there is no mechanism for the reciprocating energy current to slow down… [magnetic field curls due to equal amounts of light speed energy going in each direction cancel out, while electric fields add up] … The dynamic model is necessary to explain the new feature to be explained, the charging and discharging of a capacitor …’ – Ivor Catt.

Ivor Catt proposed the ‘Catt Anomaly’ as a wave-particle duality conflict between electron drift current (1 mm/s, carrying negligible kinetic energy) and the TEM wave mechanism for electricity (which travels at the speed of light for the insulator between the two conductors comprising the cable, such as vacuum or plastic).

Weirdly, Catt had this crackpot notion that wave-particle duality in modern physics could be resolved by studying electricity, which to modern physicists was a topic ‘done and dusted’ by Faraday and Maxwell.

In the ‘Catt Anomaly’ charge spreads along the two conductors, positive in one and negative in the other, at light speed for the medium between the wires. Reader in Electromagnetism at Bradford University, Dr Neil McEwan, and a analogue electronics engineer (Consultant to Electronics Magazine, Dr Ian Hickman), both ‘explain’ the anomaly. They both say that in the positive conductor the existing electrons get spread out so the number of positive ions per unit area exceeds the number of electrons, creating a positive field.

For the negative conductor, they both agree that the electrons bunch up, so that there is then more electrons than protons per unit length of wire, so it gains negative charge. This ignores the problem that the speed of electricity depends on the speed of light in the vacuum between the two wires, which the pushing-electron hypothesis fails to deal with.

In other words, the mechanism of electricity depends on energy exchange between each wire. Remember we are dealing with a light speed pulse, not a steady-state circuit. The whole problem with electrical theory is that it was devised before people knew that electricity goes at light speed.

Although Catt did make an enormous break through by showing that the capacitor charges up at light speed in a lot of discrete steps as it reflects off the far edge of the capacitor plates, he ignored the physical process of how energy flows across the vacuum gap of the capacitor.

Logic pulse > -------------I I-------
Logic pulse > -------------I I------- LIGHT BULB

In the two wire transmission line above, there are two capacitors in series with two wires. Each capacitor plate is symbolised by ‘I’ since I don’t have another better vertical line symbol on my keyboard to use. The light bulb at the other end of the transmission line lights up briefly. So there is a ‘displacement current’ of energy while charging or discharging occurs.

When you then consider the electron as a single charge in a negative capacitor plate (you can do this in principle by cutting a negative charged capacitor plate in half, then half again, etc., until arriving at a single charge) you find it is going at light speed.

We can conceive what happens in pair-production, which Anderson discovered in a cloud chamber in 1932. What happens is this. You send light with the energy of 2 electrons near the nucleus of a heavy atom like lead, and this light ray (a gamma ray of at least 1.022 MeV, since the electron rest mass is 0.511 MeV in energy equivalent) splits into an electron and an anti-electron (positron).

The negative electric field portion of a photon, which has mass (light is deflected by gravity and light exerts radiation pressure, implying momentum and thus mass to me), forms an electron. (The mechanism for its mass is assumed to be the Higgs field mechanism.) In the model of electron as a tiny negative capacitor plate, with negative electric field energy trapped by gravity (which is strong on a small scale due to the inverse square law) into a loop, you obtain radial electric field and dipole magnetic field in addition to spin.

What actually happens is that spinning electrons radiate energy continuously. This is aside from the quantum jumps that they radiate as photons of specific frequencies when they are decelerated. Any ‘static’ electron has light speed motion, and a continuous – not periodic – centripetal acceleration due to the spin (circular motion). The energy goes along the electric field lines. It is also receiving similar energyfrom surrounding electrons, all over the universe. The nearest electrons obviously have the greatest effect. This explains how electromagnetic forces arise; energy (with momentum p = energy/c) exchanges causeattraction when opposite charges shield one another and are pushed together by energy arriving from outside. Repulsion is where similar charges exchange energy, recoiling apart. The actual mechanism is dealt with in my April 2003 EW article. The electricity TEM wave is light-speed energy exchange between electrons.

It is an energy ‘pass the parcel’ game. Once the field exists, with a gradient in potential difference, the electrons are forced to drift, creating electric current and heating the conductor as the electrons are resisted. If I connect a metre wire from the positive to the negative terminal of a 1.5 volt cell, the electric field gradient of 1.5 volts/metre is not immediately set up. After the instant of connecting the wire to the terminals, the electric field must flow in an incomplete circuit at light speed until it completes the circuit, which takes 3.3 nanoseconds if the wire is surrounded by a dielectric like air which does not slow the speed of light too much. The whole of Ivor Catt’s work focusses on the grossly oversimplified Heaviside ‘slab of energy’ (TEM wave or Poynting-Heaviside vector, with E = c x B, where E is electric field vector, c is light velocity vector and B is magnetic field vector, with E, c and B all perpendicular to each other). In fact this vector is an over simplification, as energy exchange is also occurring at light speed along electric field lines, normally in equilibrium.

A net amount of energy passes between the plates of a capacitor at light speed while charging or discharging. (When the capacitor is in a steady charged state, it is in equilibrium with virtual energy exchange in each direction exactly cancelling out.) In order for electric field lines to have any meaning, there is energy flow along them to produce electric force. In fact, it is an exchange process, with energy being radiated and received at (normally) equal rates.

The key is not to theorise at all, as Dr Arnold Lynch explained to me. All the errors in science come from speculations being disproved. The mainstream approach is that Nobel guys speculate. You can built entirely on Catt’s experimental finding that the TEM wave is primitive. You don’t put more into the theory than is justified by experiments and observations. The output is greater than what you put in; you get testable predictions out despite not having speculated. A [vacuum dielectric] charged capacitor contains energy circulating at light speed as proved by the charging and discharging of a capacitor. When you then consider the electron as a single charge in a negative capacitor plate (you can do this in principle by cutting a negative charged capacitor plate in half, then half again, etc., until arriving at a single charge) you findit is going at light speed. You find also that this light speed is the speed of light for the opposite charge with which it is paired in the other (positively charged) capacitor plate, or rather, that the electron’s spin speed depends on the surrounding medium. The only way this can occur is if there is communication through the surrounding medium by energy exchange.

The attractive force between the plates of a charged capacitor must be explained physically. This is consistent with the plates shielding one another from space radiation pressure and being pushed together. Thus, there is energy flowing along electric field lines. We can think of this by analogy to Prevost’s 1792 suggestion that at constant temperature, cooling is only prevented by the equilibrium of energy exchange.

All electrons have a spin. If you take the known amount of spin and apply it to the classical spherical electron radius, it should be moving at 137c. Obviously this is wrong, and the physics are more complex than the usual classical spherical electron model. The electron is electromagnetic energy going at speed c.This leads to the equation proving that the electron can’t move in one direction at c, or its mass would be infinite. Spin is separate from straight line motion, I've dealt with this in the April 2003 ElectronicsWorld article. For consistent spin speed everywhere on the loop, this speed is maintained at right angles to straight line motion of the whole electron. This gives the addition of spin and straight line motion by Pythagoras. You square the spin speed, add it to the square of straight line speed, and the result is always equal to the square of light speed. The ratio of spin speed to light speed is a fundamental measure of the rate of flow of time (which depends on motion), and is equal to the FitzGerald-Lorentz transformation (1 - v^2 /c^2)^1/2

Ivor thought that because he could model the transmission line and the capacitor charging up with light-speed ‘static electricity’, he had disproved the idea of electrons. As additional evidence, he and others including Walton, Davidson and Gibson (an American programmer who invented Microsoft’s scalable fonts), have also treated the inductor and transformer using the TEM wave calculations originally applied only to the capacitor and transmission line. Ivor also argues that if an electron exists, it can’t have any size because if you touch one side of it, how can the other side respond instantly? If it doesn’t respond instantly, the electron could break, and thus would not be a fundamental particle. Obviously this argument applies to a particular idea of the electron, and does not disprove all models of electron.

Catt, in the December 1979 issue of Wireless World, had a two page paper entitled ‘Displacement Current – and How to Get Rid of It’. It is available free on the internet at www.ivorcatt.org

Displacement current is the real physical process that occurs in all electrolytic capacitors, so the subtitle ‘and How to Get Rid of It’ makes the real physics of the article look crackpot. Catt of course is talking something entirely different – capacitors with just a void (vacuum) between their plates.

The title should clearly have been ‘Maxwell’s Extra Equation Corrected: Capacitors Charge in a Series of Quantum Steps’. But on 16 September Catt blamed the editor of Wireless World for their subtitle:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ivor Catt" <ivorcatt@electromagnetism.demon.co.uk>
To: "Forrest Bishop" <forrestb@ix.netcom.com>; "Nigel Cook" <nigel.cook2@tesco.net>
Cc: "Chris Phoenix" <cphoenix@CRNano.org>
Sent: Friday, September 16, 2005 12:05 AM
Subject: Re: how a capacitor works (Cook thread)

… The subtitle to our dec78 article ("and how to get rid of it") was added by the Editor Tom Ivall without the knowledge of the authors. I have always thought that is was unhelpful, but was polite enough not to say so. My team had bigger fish to fry. …