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Re: Catt anomaly?



Savinainen Antti wrote:

I carelessly quoted

when a pulse is sent down a simple cable (e.g. coaxial),
the edge of the electric field is moving at c.

John Denker responded (as well as Bernard Cleyet) to this. Of course I should
have clarified that c refers to speed of light in a given medium (or nearly so)
which is not the same as speed of light in vacuum.

I checked the Catt-anomaly web page before posting
my original analysis. There is no doubt that Mr.
Catt has got the physics wrong; the confusion is due
to Mr. Catt and not due to Mr. Savinainen or anybody
else. See below for more on this.

Catt writes
(<http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/w99anbk2.htm>):

"Consider the case when the battery and lamp are connected by two very long
parallel wires, their length being 300,000 kilometres. When the switch is
closed, current will
flow immediately into the front end of the wires, but the lamp will not light
for the first second. A wave front travels forward between the wires at the
speed of light,
reaching the lamp after one second.

This is an accurate quote. Catt's physics is unambiguously wrong.
There is no arrangement of parallel wires that will propagate
a pulse at 300,000 kilometers per second. For ordinary off-the-
shelf twinlead the velocity factor is about 0.82.

This fact is so obvious and so well-known and so fatal to Catt's
argument that further discussion is pointless.

What is interesting to me is that according to Catt two experts in
electromagnetism gave different answers to his question.

I don't care what Catt says his "experts" say. The
laws of physics are not enacted by the votes of "experts"
or anybody else. When Catt gets the physics right, I'll
pay attention to what he says.