I've suggested (& published in 15 journal papers) a new theory called quantised inertia (or MiHsC) that assumes that inertia is caused by relativistic horizons damping quantum fields. It predicts galaxy rotation, cosmic acceleration & the emdrive without any dark stuff or adjustment.
My Plymouth University webpage is here, I've written a book called Physics from the Edge and I'm on twitter as @memcculloch

## Tuesday, 27 October 2015

### MiHsC with horizons, no waves.

Here are some schematics to show how MiHsC explains inertia, for the first time, in a mechanistic way, and also the observed cosmic acceleration. This explanation is equivalent to my previous explanations using Unruh waves fitting into the cosmic horizon, but uses Rindler and cosmic horizons only, no waves, for simplicity.

Imagine a spaceship in deep space (the black central object, below). It sees a spherical cosmic horizon, where objects are diverging away from it at the speed of light (the dot-dashed line). This line is an information horizon, so the people on the spaceship can know nothing about what lies behind it. This horizon produces Unruh radiation (orange arrows) that hit the ship from all directions. The spaceship is firing its engines (red flames) and accelerates to the right (black arrow), so information from a certain distance to the left can never catch up with the spacecraft, so a Rindler information horizon appears behind it to the left, and MiHsC says that the Rindler horizon damps the Unruh radiation from the left (the orange arrows disappear) so more radiation hits from the right and a leftwards force appears that opposes the rightwards acceleration. This predicts inertial mass (McCulloch, 2013) which has never before been explained, only assumed.

Now imagine the spaceship starts to run out of fuel, so that its acceleration rightwards decreases (smaller red jet, smaller black arrow, see below). Now the Rindler horizon moves further away (the distance to it is c^2/a, where c is the speed of light and a is the acceleration). Now a bit more Unruh radiation can arrive from the left so the net Unruh radiation imbalance and the inertial force is weaker, to mirror the lower acceleration:
Now the engine dies completely, and you would expect there to be no acceleration at all. The Rindler horizon is just about to retreat behind the cosmic horizon, but before it does the ship now feels Unruh radiation pressure almost equally from all directions, so its inertial mass starts to collapse..

As its inertia collapses the spacecraft becomes suddenly very sensitive to any external force, including from the gravitating black dot in the bottom right of the picture, so it is now accelerated towards that (the lower inertia makes the gravitational attraction seem stronger than expected, as an aside: this fixes the galaxy rotation problem without the need for dark matter) and a new Rindler horizon appears near the top of the picture to produce an Unruh field that opposes the acceleration
It turns out that in order for the Rindler horizon to be disallowed from retreating behind the cosmic horizon, there is a minimum acceleration allowed in MiHsC which is 2c^2/Theta where Theta is the Hubble diameter (the width of the observable cosmos). This acceleration is similar in size to the recently observed cosmic acceleration, and explains it without the need for dark energy.

References

McCulloch, M.E., 2013. Inertia from an asymmetric Casimir effect, EPL, 101, 59001. http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.2775

Czeko said...

Best explanation so far.

Alain Coetmeur said...

interesting.
I think about what is the way matter interact with unruh radiation, to behave like mass...

If I understand well, if a radiation interact with matter, it is because of Higgs boson ? and the sensibility to higgs is what creat various particles mass?

unruhradiation which interact with higgs boson and particle maybe change the pattern, creating casimir effect ?

is Higgs mechanism compatible with MiHsC ,inertia? or do they compete?

Mike McCulloch said...

Czeko: Thanks. I'm working on a sheltering model & I can get to Newton, but oddly I seem to lose a dimension on the way!.. Can't say more yet..

Mike McCulloch said...

Alain: The Higgs mechanism is only responsible for electron & quark mass, only 0.1% of known mass, so it is negligible.

Ryan Pavlick said...

Losing a dimension makes sense in light of the holographic principle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle#Energy.2C_matter.2C_and_information_equivalence

ZeroIsEverything said...

On the street

Police officer:
- Sir, is this your dimension?!

Mike:
- Why, thank you very much. I didn't really miss it. You can keep it, and have a nice day.

Analytic D said...

I went on a 16 mile hike in September and something about the solitude and the motion led me to thinking about an MiHsC related sheltering model for hours as I wore out my legs.

I'm convinced that gravity is due to particle pairwise sheltering. Two massive particles at distance r will block respective waves from the other's horizon that have a node at it's partner, causing an equal pressure pushing them together. Obviously, r/2 will have more nodes and thus more pressure. But this is only a linear relationship. The inverse square law comes into play with gravity because QM implies that the number of long waves increases with the surface area at a given radial distance, however linearly fewer wavelengths will have nodes as that wavelength increases, generating an inverse square relationship for sheltering.

And the empirical m*m term is due to the round robin of sheltering, since particle A1 shelters B1 and B2, as does A2 shelters B1 and B2, for four pairs of sheltering to produce the force, which matches the Newtonian description. B1 sheltering B2 produces no net force towards A and vice versa.

This has some implications with high acceleration away from large bodies as well as providing an explicit mechanism for mutual acceleration (I didn't have a mental image of that until now). For example, like you've said, a ring with mass rotating fast enough would experience no gravity from bodies above/below the axis of rotation.

I have a feeling though that Mike's derivation is a bit off from my incredibly rough picture here, though.

Mike McCulloch said...

Ryan: Indeed, you're right and I'm hoping to explain the lost dimension w/ the holographic principle. The alternative is that gravity just can't be captured this way.. We'll see!

Mike McCulloch said...

ZeroIsEverything: :) Your joke didn't fall flat.

ZeroIsEverything said...

Mike:
If you lose a dimension and spacetime degenerates into a e.g. 2D holographic surface, I guess it's flatlander time for everyone then? ;)

Mike McCulloch said...

Analytic D: Thanks for sharing this. I could do with going on a long hike as well. Fresh air, open moors, lots of time to think: 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance', 'Not all who wander are lost'..etc.

I've been trying to get gravity into the MiHsC framework three ways: 1) using sheltering, 2) from the uncertainty principle involving interactions between Planck masses (published) and 3) from changes in horizon areas. You're suggesting a mix of 1 and the interaction part of option 2, which is the way to go: IMO the answer will use all three, but the maths seems to be suggesting something further than my intuition can go at the moment. I can get G in F=GMm/r^2 to within half a percent, but as I said it falls flat because I lose a dimension. I need that long walk..

qraal said...

Maybe spacetime is 5-D and we're on a 3-sphere 'surface' of a 4-space?

Czeko said...

Odd question: what generates Unruh radiation?

Mike McCulloch said...

Czeko: The standard explanation of Unruh radiation is that a Rindler horizon splits up ever-forming zpf virtual particle pairs so the unpaired particles become real, but I'm moving towards an informational understanding and I can derive the usual formula like this: when a Rindler horizon forms it reduces the uncertainty in position Delta_x, so by Heisenberg Delta_p must increase. Since E=pc, energy is produced. Energy from information loss. See Appendix C of my book (the appendices are available for free as a pdf on the world scientific webpage for my book).

qraal said...

Interesting preprint from Matt Walker & Abraham Loeb, which might add clues to the nature of "dark mass/energy" and support the Inertial Horizon view:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1146

Is the Universe Simpler than LCDM?

Matthew G. Walker, Abraham Loeb

(Submitted on 6 Jan 2014 (v1), last revised 28 May 2014 (this version, v2))

In the standard cosmological model, the Universe consists mainly of two invisible substances: vacuum energy with constant mass-density rho_v=\Lambda/(8pi G) (where Lambda is a cosmological constant' originally proposed by Einstein and G is Newton's gravitational constant) and cold dark matter (CDM) with mass density that is currently rho_{DM,0}\sim 0.3 rho_v. This LCDM' model has the virtue of simplicity, enabling straightforward calculation of the formation and evolution of cosmic structure against the backdrop of cosmic expansion. Here we review apparent discrepancies with observations on small galactic scales, which LCDM must attribute to complexity in the baryon physics of galaxy formation. Yet galaxies exhibit structural scaling relations that evoke simplicity, presenting a clear challenge for formation models. In particular, tracers of gravitational potentials dominated by dark matter show a correlation between orbital size, R, and velocity, V, that can be expressed most simply as a characteristic acceleration, a_{DM}\sim 1 km^2 s^{-2} pc^{-1} \approx 3 x 10^{-9} cm s^{-2} \approx 0.2c\sqrt{G rho_v}, perhaps motivating efforts to find a link between localized and global manifestations of the Universe's dark components.

Czeko said...

@mike Does the principle of locality is broken in your example?

Mike McCulloch said...

Czeko: The example does need non-locality, but this doesn't bother relativity because the selection or deselection of Unruh waves by the horizon can be achieved at the phase velocity. Unruh waves, infinite in extent and each of constant frequency cannot carry information, so their phase velocities can be greater than c.

Czeko said...

Someone was very concerned by this very point and throwed your theory to the bin because of that. Is there a formal formulation explaining why the locality principle is broken and in which way it doesn't matter at all?

Zephir said...

The explanation of inertia with radiation pressure of Unruh waves is sorta recursive by itself, as it depends on inertia of Unruh waves. And how large/distant the Rindler horizon is in comparison to cosmic horizon? The Unruh radiation propagates with speed of light, so that no inertia induced by its shielding can be a momentary effect.

http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.cz/2015/10/explaining-mihsc-with-schematics.html

https://i.imgur.com/OKTzJma.jpg

Mike McCulloch said...

Zephir: There is no relativistic light speed limit for monochromatic waves (as Unruh waves are) since such waves carry no information.

Zephir said...

/* There is no relativistic light speed limit for monochromatic waves (as Unruh waves are) since such waves carry no information. */

In relativity the Unruh radiation is essentially black body radiation: it's neither monochromatic, neither superluminal. The filtering white light to monochromatic doesn't make it superluminal.