The syntax you're using is completely different to the one in the linked documentation. There is essentially no difference between normalizing a scatter or a pcolor(mesh) or just any other scalar mappable object.

It's always

colormap = plt.cm.bwr #or any other colormap
normalize = matplotlib.colors.Normalize(vmin=-1, vmax=1)
plt.scatter(x, y, c=z, s=5, cmap=colormap, norm=normalize, marker='*')

I realise that the poster's issue has already been resolved, but the question of normalizing the colors was never dealt with. Since I've figured out how I thought I'd just drop this here for anyone else who might need it.

First you create a norm and pass that to the plotting function, I've tried to add this to the OP's code.

from matplotlib import cm
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import axes3d, Axes3D
import pylab as p
import matplotlib

vima=0.5

fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.gca(projection='3d')
X = np.arange(0, 16.67, vima)
Y = np.arange(0, 12.5, vima)
X, Y = np.meshgrid(X, Y)

Z = np.sqrt(((1.2*Y+0.6*X)**2+(0.2*Y+1.6*X)**2)/(0.64*Y**2+0.36*X**2))
Z = np.nan_to_num(Z)

# Make the norm
norm = matplotlib.colors.Normalize(vmin = np.min(Z), vmax = np.max(Z), clip = False)

# Plot with the norm
surf = ax.plot_surface(X, Y, Z,rstride=1, cstride=1, norm=norm, alpha=1,cmap=cm.jet,     linewidth=0)
fig.colorbar(surf, shrink=0.5, aspect=5)

plt.show()

The norm works the same way for the "imshow" command.