I've suggested (& published in 21 journal papers) a new theory called quantised inertia (or MiHsC) that assumes that inertia is caused by horizons damping quantum fields. It predicts galaxy rotation & lab thrusts without any dark stuff or adjustment. My University webpage is here, I've written a book called Physics from the Edge and I'm on twitter as @memcculloch. Most of my content is at patreon now: here

Saturday 21 March 2015

One-wave MiHsC and the EmDrive

MiHsC (see an introduction) assumes that inertia is caused by a radiation pressure from Unruh radiation, and that the waves of this radiation are only allowed to exist if they have nodes at information horizons like the Rindler (local) or Hubble (cosmic) horizon, because if they didn't have nodes there, we could infer what lies behind the horizon and it wouldn't be a horizon (logic/information affects local physics).

So far with MiHsC I've used an approximation, and assumed that as accelerations decrease, then the number of waves in the Unruh spectrum decreases linearly as they are disallowed by the horizon, and so the inertial mass decreases in a new way (predicting galaxy rotation without dark matter...etc). I can get away with this because the accelerations are rarely small enough that only one or two Unruh waves fit.

To apply MiHsC to the resonating emdrive (a truncated metal cone), and probably to very low cosmic accelerations too, I need to consider individual Unruh waves. So I have recently tried an alternative approximation of MiHsC that assumes that there is only one wave at the peak of the Unruh radiation spectrum and this wave either fits or doesn't within the horizon (which for the emdrive, is its walls). This leads to a prediction for the anomalous force on the emdrive (F) like this

F = -PQ/c * (|sin(pi*w_small/L)|-|sin(pi*w_big/L)|)

where P is the input power, Q is the quality factor, c is the speed of light, w_big and w_small are the diameters of the big and small end plates of the emdrive, and L is its length. As you can see I'm using the magnitude of a sin function to decide whether the Unruh wave (only one now) fits within the walls or not, at the wide end and the narrow end. This Table shows how the results differ from what I had before:

Experiment       Observed      MiHsC2d    OnewaveMiHsC
                                     ----  milliNewtons ----
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shawyer 1             16               4.1              7.7
Shawyer 2           147           148.9            54.7

Cannae drive           9               5.3              4.3
Juan et al. A         214           154               39
Juan et al. B         315            241              61
NASA B1                 0.09          0.26            0.07
NASA B2                 0.05          0.63            0.18
NASA B3                 0.06          0.12            0.03
NASA vacuum        0.03          0.70            0.20

As you can see, I've used the 2d (two-dimensional) version of spectrum-MiHsC to compare with the 2d one-wave MiHsC, for a fair comparison. I've shown the Cannae and Juan (2012) cases in red because I'm not confident I have the right geometry for them. MiHsC predicts that (usually) photons are more likely to see a resonating Unruh wave at the wide end, so the photons' inertia increases as they go towards the wide end and to conserve momentum the whole cone then has to move the other way. As you can see, the new formulation is much better for the NASA data but worse for the more powerful of the Shawyer experiments (I still don't know the uncertainties in the data).

Interestingly, this approach predicts there can be a reverse mode for the emdrive (not a particularly bold prediction I admit since NASA may have seen a reverse already). MiHsC predicts this reverse occurs if you 'tune' the Unruh waves to fit better into the narrow end.

I've been trying to develop a one-wave version of MiHsC for application to cosmology for ages, the emdrive is useful (if real) because it provides data on which to test progress.

My earlier blogs on the Emdrive can be accessed here.

15 comments:

Unknown said...

is it really necessary to have your RSS feed post this article 10 times in one day to my inbox?

Mike McCulloch said...

Sorry about that. I do edit a lot after posting..

Unknown said...

Mike, you might have posted a bit too quickly:

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=36313.1440

Towards the bottom of that page, 'Star Drive,' member of the Eagleworks team, posted a link to (yet another) theory on how the EM Drive works. Beyond me, but it may be superficially similar to your theory.

At the bottom of that page, and continuing into the next, NSF member 'Mulletron' posts the initial results from his brand new frustum experiments. He does note...I'll call it 'significant technical issues,' though.

So...somebody in your corner of the world you could persuade to build one of these things? Maybe that unbalanced fellow in the engineering department? :)

Unknown said...

Oh, and before I forget, 'Star Drive' also posts a fair number of plots for this device in the 'reverse' setting.

Consensus is, if this thing really can reverse, the effect is 'real.'

Alain_Co said...

About the reverse mode, it seems to allow a way to reverse by changing the frequency ?

about the varying results of Yang Juand, Shawyer, with power, can it be such detuning ? overlapping of forward and backward thrust ?

Mike McCulloch said...

Tim: If you want my opinion of GEM, on first look, it's a over-labyrinthine 5-dimensional beastie, but the proof is in the comparison with data and GEM is far less successful than MiHsC. I've tried their Eq. 40 and GEM's predicted thrusts are ~100 times too small (0.2 microNewton/Watt) when compared with the data.

I'm impressed with Mulletron's attitude,and a few others I'm in contact with, in setting up an experiment. Exactly the right thing to do. If I ever find a crazy engineer willing to help..

Mike McCulloch said...

Alain: Indeed, MiHsC says that if the situation is arranged such that (unusually) more Unruh waves are allowed at the narrow end, then the thrust'll reverse. I'm writing a second MiHsC-emdrive paper on this.

Tom Black said...

I'm a little confused by the placement of parentheses in your equation:

F = -PQ/c * (|sin(pi*w_small/L)|-|sin(pi*w_big)/L|)

Did you mean the following?

F = -PQ/c * (|sin(pi*w_small/L)|-|sin(pi*w_big/L)|)

Mike McCulloch said...

Yes, that's a typo. Thanks. Now corrected.

bbbl67 said...

It seems that MiHsC is a possible explanation for MOND. If your theory for EmDrive works, do you think it'll ignite a renewed look at MOND too?

I'm thinking that it might also have some relevance to Dark Energy theory too.

Mike McCulloch said...

MiHsC predicts something very close to MoND. The difference is that MoND needs an adjustable parameter to be fitted by hand (a0), but MiHsC doesn't (it predicts the parameter itself). The predictions of the two do differ slightly.

At the risk of sounding too good to be true, MiHsC also predicts cosmic acceleration (dark energy):

http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/cosmic-acceleration-from-mihsc.html

bbbl67 said...

I had independently come to the conclusion that the Casimir Effect had something to do with these phenomena known as Dark Matter and Dark Energy too. Not being formally trained in theoretical physics (background is mechanical engineering), I didn't have enough of the math background, so I didn't know how to explain myself mathematically. Instead, had a lot of diagrams, and some curve-fit equations that I had tried. Reading the typical physics community papers, I got the feeling that no one else was thinking along these lines, until you. So thank you, the universe needs independent thinkers like you.

So do you think your theory once it's fully formalized, be able to explain the gravitational lensing seen around galactic clusters, that seem to be used as the biggest proof for Dark Matter?

As for Dark Energy, it seems you have an actual mechanism for why we see effect of Dark Energy. Do you see one day that Einstein's Cosmological Constant will be replaced by MiHsC, within the framework of General Relativity? The Cosmological Constant seems to be just a hand-inserted fudge factor, yours seems more formal.

Another thing, you mentioned that MiHsC would somehow modify the speed of light assumption in Special Relativity. How does it do that?

Finally, a few years ago there was another theory that attempted to link Dark Matter and Dark Energy together. They called it Dark Fluid. Have you ever looked at it? http://arxiv.org/abs/0711.0958

Mike McCulloch said...

bbbl67: Yes, I think MiHsC will eventually explain lensing. The data from the emdrive has allowed me to make the leap of applying MiHsC to light.

Einstein's cosmological constant was a arbitrary fudge that can now be explained properly by MiHsC.

Regarding MiHsC and the speed of light: I'll need a whole blog entry to go into that. It raises many further questions, so I'd better write it carefully. Stay tuned.

No, I didn't look at dark fluid, because it seemed to me, even from the title, to be the addition of another arbitrary and invisible object.

bbbl67 said...

When do you think you're going to present the MiHsC vs. Speed of Light assumption blog entry?

As for Dark Fluid, the authors present it as an alternative to Dark Matter and Dark Energy, where they model the entire universe as a fluid dynamics system.

Mike McCulloch said...

bbbl67: Dark fluid needs several arbitrary parameters to work. These numbers have to be put into the theory by hand. I don't believe theories like that.

MiHsC does the same job without any arbitrary parameters at all.