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 28 April 2018

A whole new industry

I had a friend at York University who was always responding to my comments by saying "Well, how does that put petrol in my tank?" and although I tend to drift off into theoretical realms I have always been surrounded by practical engineers (my dad and my wife) so I always eventually get reminded that science has to be useful.

OK, the most direct, and the one I have now won $1.3 million of funding for (subject to negotiation) is thrust. Quantised inertia (QI) predicts that if you stick a horizon in the vacuum, that is: you use an arrangement of metal to bend light and stop information transfer across a surface of space, then you damp the local vacuum field (Casimir effect like) and nearby objects will move towards the damper in a new way. This form of propulsion is fuel-less. Or, if you like, the fuel is the vacuum/nothing which is freely available everywhere. It won't be technically easy, but it should be possible to launch into space without rockets this way. Also, with standard physics, travel to the nearest star in a human lifetime is not possible: you have to take a planet-sized amount of fuel! With QI it is possible since the fuel is empty space and there's lots of that out there. So, with quantised inertia, the more empty your car tank is, the more fuel you have! There you go Jason.. The evidence for the thruster is in this paper.
The second application is energy production. Quantised inertia predicts that you can get energy out of the vacuum by forming a tiny closed information space. To put it simply: since dp x dx ~ hbar/2, if you squash dx (ie: a closed space), you get new momentum and energy out. The evidence for this is that this assumption produces quantised inertia (reference) and all the agreements with data I have published, and it may help to explain cold fusion, which occurs in small spaces.

The next application would save as much money initially as the first one. Huge amounts of imaginary dark matter are put into disc galaxies because, to put it crudely, general relativity has not predicted one single galaxy rotation ever (except for one found recently, which looks to be an subsampling error). QI explains galaxy rotation without dark matter, and also explains cosmic acceleration, so a huge amount of research money could be redirected from dark matter searches and dark energy theorists to the thruster applications above.

The fourth application is more speculative, but I am beginning to see that quantised inertia predicts that matter is only the interaction of photons and information horizons, which means that we can form any type of matter from light and horizons: cue the Star Trek replicator. This is similar to the work of Jennison who predicted the electron from photons in a cavity. QI says the cavity is a horizon.

What I'm trying to say is that quantised inertia is the seed for a huge new physics and engineering industry that will dwarf Manchester's graphene breakthrough and eventually dwarf everything else as well. I have evidence to back this: I've published 21 papers now on it, evidence included. I now need this newfound funding to test it, so I hope it does not get torpedoed..

If you wish to support my work a little, you can do so here:
https://www.paypal.me/MikeMcCulloch

23 comments:

Jimmy Johnson said...

Mike,

I love it. Somenoe has finally indicated how "Cavorite" might be produced.


Jimmy Johnson

Simon Derricutt said...

Great news, Mike! I had wondered about the reduction in your presence here recently. I presume you have some ideas to test out as to how to produce that information-shield. It could be as simple as a sheet of superconductor, but I'd have thought that we'd have noticed something if it was. Possibly some very-fast-moving superconductor, though, given the Podkletnov data.

It is obvious (and acknowledged in some textbooks) that the EM field has to be able to source and sink momentum, and thus that in electromagnetism that Newton's law of conservation of momentum has a light-speed modification. Momentum is transferred via the fields, and the instantaneous sum of the momenta we can measure is not actually a constant. This is a small effect but I think it can be magnified and exploited anyway. A QI near horizon would be a lot more effective.

Generating new energy is really going to change things, though. The evidence for that will need to be foolproof. Still, that's where the logic points, so provided the artificial horizon can be made the system will break CoE.

Interesting times....

joesixpack said...

Great stuff. The information shield to me is a great idea because it cuts generation out as an input. It is more like redirecting energy, like a cosmic sail.

How well would a shield have to work, however, say to replace a good old-fashioned small modular nuclear reactor and an EM drive with a high Q factor?

(Note the date, doesn't seem like an April Fool's...)

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/04/mach-effect-propellantless-drive-gets-niac-phase-2-and-progress-to-great-interstellar-propulsion.html#so-post-comments-143700

Looks like theoretical and experimental research is being funded globally and will drive the issue, regardless of what tut-tutting bully boy scientism believers preach.

I think 20-25 years for powered RF cavity/horizon thruster flight/travel is a bit lame really. von Ohain went from conceptual design to a flying jet (He 178) in for years.

joesixpack said...

"The second application is energy production. Quantised inertia predicts that you can get energy out of the vacuum by forming a tiny closed information space. To put it simply: since dp x dx ~ hbar/2, if you squash dx (ie: a closed space), you get new momentum and energy out. The evidence for this is that this assumption produces quantised inertia (reference) and all the agreements with data I have published, and it may help to explain cold fusion, which occurs in small spaces."

Could this mean simply a small crystalline structure basically creates its own horizon? The issue is how to make this useful. Can it be done without LENR; either redirecting straight into a horizon drive or into electrical energy? Maybe the technology is staring us in the face regarding ever smaller semiconductor gates. If there was a way to dope circuits with the right sized holes, you might have some interesting results.

Perhaps we'll see some sort of synergy with materials engineering (cue graphene and Johnson-Matthey's Pd again)? Smolyaninov has a lot of research on metamaterials and Unruh radiation. As a physics undergrad, I find his work in this area "trippy" and difficult to conceptualise.

Gaaark said...

Hope you get the funding! This must be so exciting for you.

It would be nice to see the backside of dark matter.
:)

joesixpack said...

Dr McCulloch,

Regarding my comment on 28 April 2018 at 20:37, would you consider QI as a guide as for how to design materials that are conducive to Woodward's MEGA Drive in that it can guide the design of materials which engender or optimise "transient mass fluctuations"?

Exciting times. Funding and conference discussions from the US:

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/04/mach-effect-propellantless-drive-gets-niac-phase-2-and-progress-to-great-interstellar-propulsion.html

joesixpack said...

Seen on the sometimes utterly risible "Rational Wiki".

So is this gyroscope/Sagnac effect analogue correct?

I have a feeling that Dr McCulloch may disagree at least in part regarding the concordance of relativity and QM.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Talk:EmDrive

No Laws are violated - existing laws are not widely understood
The em drive is no more than an application of the Sagnac effect, exploited daily in every ring laser or fibre-optic gyro, which would similarly be considered impossible by the flat-earthers 'debunking' the EM drive. The difference is that ring laser gyros have been used in inertial navigation for the past forty years. The bottom line is that it is not 'reactionless' but it reacts against inertial space itself, just as said gyro will yield the rotation with respect to inertial space. Any attempt to explain it with quantum theory will inevitably fail because the constancy of the velocity of light is not inherent in quantum theory. All the controversy demonstrates is how few physicists actually understand their subject; mathematical prowess having been so often mistaken for actual insight. — Unsigned, by: 86.155.242.62 / talk

Gabriel said...

Hi Mike

Ok, EMI is conserved. And through transformations, everything and the whole universe can be considered as one of these quantities, especially information.

It's way above me to calculate, but would this quantity vary over time (since early times), or would it be a constant?

If a constant, I wonder if it is related to the computational capacity limit of our simulated universe. Introducing Information as a basic physic quantity is very close to considering our universe a simulation, and preventing information inflation a convenient way to avoid it crashing.

Zephir said...

Hello Michael, Troubled Times for Alternatives to Einstein’s Theory of Gravity could You please address it somehow?

Mike McCulloch said...

Zephir: There are a lot of articles like this now with nothing solid in them (Also, in the general media). They cite phenomena that are uncertain and far off (distant neutron stars collapsing? Really? Are they sure?) to back up arbitrary models (dark matter) that are complex and unfalsifiable (very bad science). Very few seem to question the speculative narrative. They also never mention QI which predicts disc galaxies without any adjustment. The only honest test is in the lab and that's the way I'm going.

Simon Derricutt said...

Joesixpack - useful stuff. I finally got the time to look up Sagnac and Woodward (Mach) effects, and some interesting points came up. First one, maybe, is that without the RestOfUniverse, we wouldn't be able to use a gyroscope, since the ROU defines the inertial frame. One of those basic things we know yet lose sight of. The second one is that all linear momentum exchanges must happen through a field of some sort - the atoms do not actually contact each other to transfer momentum, and the momentum must be first transferred to the field from the first object and then transferred from the field to the second object after a certain delay. Though mostly we measure momentum to be conserved in collisions, therefore, the fields (EM, gravity, nuclear) have the capability to source and sink momentum (and presumably also store it) and thus we can conceive of situations where the summed momentum we measure does not remain constant during an interaction since the field may deliver extra or carry some off, and we don't have the capability of measuring what's in the field yet. Third point is that we must be affected all the time by the ROU as regards momentum transfers, and that momentum can be transferred to it or from it. At the moment we're not that good at doing that, with the MEGA Drive and EMDrive showing small (and contested) effects, but it does seem that there's no physical law stopping us doing it better. I'm currently testing out an idea of setting up a magnetic standing wave and seeing whether a current loop will show such an anomalous force.

Gyroscope effects really point to an instantaneous transfer of information from everywhere in the ROU to local. We don't see any delay in the production of the gyroscope's reaction to an external force, yet without the ROU that force could not exist. The ROU also defines our inertial frames of reference, which also implies instantaneous knowledge of where the ROU is relative to us. It thus ought to be possible to exchange momentum with the ROU if momentum is actually conserved, or to create/destroy it if it isn't.

One interesting point about building an artificial horizon (in order to make a QI drive) is that we're actually intending to cut off that access to a section of the universe. If it's beyond our new horizon, then it can't affect our ship. If, as has been speculated here (see blog article on variation of inertial mass by the Moon), a planetary mass can act as a shield, or by a hot body such as the Sun where particles are moving at high speed, then a shield would seem fairly simple. Just spin a disk rapidly. Note that, in gravity calculations, we assume G is actually a constant and thus work out the mass of the Sun and planets accordingly, so saying that we actually know the mass of those objects has an inbuilt assumption that may not be true.

The portion of the ROU that is cut from our perception by an object such as the Sun will also vary as 1/r², so if we're prepared to change our definition of the cause of gravity from an unknown property of all mass to something where a body produces a horizon then it's possible that we'll find that the idea is internally consistent and also fits observational data as well. Might make black holes a bit harder to explain, though. On the other hand, since it seems that all fundamental particles act as if they are black holes, with the mass existing at the Schwartzschild limit, then any mass will cut off our perception of the ROU in proportion to its measured inertial mass. Another interesting (and possibly relevant) property of a black hole is that at the Schwarzschild limit, time stops, and within that radius time is undefined. I suppose a volume in which time has stopped would effectively stop us knowing what was beyond that. There's thus possibly a reason why a black hole of any size acts as an information barrier and as a horizon.

All this could be a load of cobblers, of course - I'm just following the rabbithole and seeing where it goes.

joesixpack said...

Cobblers maybe but interesting nevertheless. It seems there are possibly several ways to unite GR and QM.

It would be interesting if there is a relationship between the Schwarzschild radius and quantised inertia (regarding standing waves). Perhaps that is instructive regarding metamaterials for exotic propulsion, optics and energy production.

Simon Derricutt said...

Joe - I spent a while thinking on your suggestions, but haven't come up with anything useful. It looks like you're also finding this rabbithole interesting, though.

The sort of thrust that the EMDrive can currently generate is so low that the effect, if it had been seen elsewhere, would have been ignored as experimental error. There are also forces between antennae that are driven at 1/4 wave phase difference and are spaced 1/4 wave apart - see https://neolegesmotus.wordpress.com/2015/06/12/the-electromagnetic-non-newtonian-propulsion-or-pnn-e/ where there has been a long-term attempt to get this up to a measurable thrust that again seems to break CoM but in fact the momentum change is supplied by the EM field. Still, looks like they've still not overcome the overheating problem, and can only run a few minutes at a time. Since they'd need to run totally enclosed in order to avoid possible air movements upsetting the measurements, getting rid of the heat will be a big problem. Of course, if the thrust remains constant no matter what speed the motor is running, then like Mike's suggestion it will break CoE too.

Shaun said...

Congratulations Mike on the funding, all the very best of luck. Have endeavoured to follow you for some time now so glad to see things are moving forward.

Shaun said...

Congratulations on the funding Mike, hope all goes well for you. I have endeavoured to follow you for some years now so am glad things are now moving forward for you.

joesixpack said...

Could induced gravity really explain all RF cavity drives?

An extension of GR is that all matter and energy influence spacetime.

Forget for a moment QI, standing wave cancellation and how the balance is restored with the rest of the universe (which is clearly fascinating).

Being held in place; the cavity is simply a chamber which allows the momentum of photons to bend spacetime.

The Unruh waves then aren't necessarily part of the thrust or causal but are "waste" of the cancelled waves. The transmission of the cancelled energy to the ROU may be the most interesting aspect of all of this.

What I'm saying is that artificial horizons direct energy in a more useful manner and in a way, create an artificial gravity vector. Again, what happens to the cancelled waves is most interesting, but I post they are waste and not influential on theoretical or effective thrust.

It would perhaps be interesting to see if a laser or maser (or any concentrated energy source) like input to a RF cavity thruster could be used and if this increases thrust in a manner that exceeds a linear relationship with input power to thrust. I apologise if this has been tried before, what I am aware of is using a laser and a resonator to see if C changed in the cavity.

I think Mike has said this last experimental observation was disproven but the way I interpret this is that C itself of the RF beams or the observational laser does not change but the mechanism might alter the *observations* for the (observational) laser. Also, if a small amount of the observational energy is carried away by the RF beams ("propellant"), then as the beams do cancel, then at a quantum level (which Mike suggests might be timeless) there might be "extra" Unruh radiation which equilibrates with an instantaneous effect on the observed reflected/resonated beam; however C itself never actually changes (at least not in this or a similar apparatus)?

Simon Derricutt said...

Joe - with EM waves, a reflection comes with a 180° phase change of either the electric or magnetic component. We can also view that as the atoms at the reflecting surface producing that antiphase wave that in the forward direction cancels out the forward wave and in the reflected direction is measurable (since the electric and magnetic waves both exist in the reflected wave). In the forward direction, though, where we can't measure any wave (since either the electrical or magnetic component is zero) there may nevertheless be *something* travelling. Does this "orphaned" electric or magnetic wave carry momentum? Maybe somewhat difficult to actually measure unless the wave density is very high, as it would be in the resonant cavity of the EMDrive.

Since from one point of view (i.e. where the mass is concentrated) atoms are mostly empty space, it's hard to see how they can produce an artificial horizon - there's a lot more gap than there is stuff blocking the view of what's beyond. It's thus possible that although QI does produce the right figures for the EMDrive when the dielectric effect is corrected for, it may not be the ultimate explanation for what's really happening. I'd suggest therefore holding (and developing) multiple alternate explanations for the reason the EMDrive works until we can knock out one of them because a prediction doesn't pan out. There's still that outlier for QI of Shawyer's first experiment, where QI predicts the magnitude pretty well but in the opposite direction. That may of course be an experimental error in reading the direction - sounds silly that he could have got the direction wrong but all it takes is a couple of crossed wires in a load cell since there's not really any movement to measure.

The main problem with using higher frequencies in the cavity (such as lasers etc.) is that the physical dimensions will change with temperature, thus maintaining a high-enough Q becomes very difficult. IIRC, since 1983 the speed of light has been defined as constant, with both distance and time related to c, so measuring any change in c is *difficult*.

Still, it's standard theory that an EM photon carries momentum. What's not defined is whether an "orphaned" electric or magnetic wave on its own can carry momentum (it's not a photon). Can the Unruh wave carry momentum? Since an Unruh wave is also not a photon, maybe not, but then all the fields we know of must be able to carry and transmit momentum (since momentum is always transferred through the action of a field).

More thinking needed about the nature of momentum and the ways it is transferred....

joesixpack said...

I agree a multiple hypothesis view is the best. The reason why I thought EM-induced gravity might be a reasonable explanation was that the thrust was so low. I think higher energy density propellant waves scaling output (thrust) faster than an input of the same given magnitude but less density is a logical corollary of GR (this make me think of the Kugelblitz for more than energy production...).

Shawyer believes his "standard physics" of EM waves and waveguides explains the RF cavity thruster totally. Because it is still considered fringe, I'm not sure anyone else has looked into it in a formal manner.

I'd love to see simulation and experimental data that looks at the multiple hypotheses of Shawyer, QI (and other modified gravity/inertia models), EM-induced gravity and GAK (Grahn, Anila and Kolehmainen).

Simon Derricutt said...

Joe - more thinking about momentum. I've been unconsciously regarding it as "something" that is transferred - after all it has units, we can measure it, and there's a Law that it is conserved. However those assumptions don't seem to be justified.

Maybe the main thing is that momentum must be transferred by fields, and that there is no direct transfer of momentum. Even when we look at a Newton's Cradle those balls, which appear to touch and click as they swing, don't get any closer than atomic distances, with the electrical fields being the medium of transfer from one ball to the next. This transfer by the action of fields does result in there being a clock difference during the momentum transfer - though we assume that the force times time for the first object will be the same for the second object, this cannot be exactly true because each object will have its own clock depending on its velocity.

Momentum transfer is thus a transfer of force from the first object for a certain time into the field, followed by transmission through the field (a delay of various length depending on the distance of the action), followed by a force times time on the second object. For balls hitting each other, the force times time is substantially the same for both and the difference will be unmeasurably small, and this is why we measure momentum to be conserved. The force times time (impact) will be almost exactly the same for the ball transferring the momentum and the ball having momentum transferred to it.

This may look somewhat like nit-picking, but the result is that momentum is never precisely conserved but that normally the difference is unmeasurably small. We can however calculate the difference if we want to, even with a Newton's Cradle.

When we're talking about a longer-distance interaction, though, the time taken for the force to be transmitted through the field can become important and the error in precise conservation of momentum can become measurable. If we assume that the transmission of the force can only propagate at c (may not be true for gravitational forces, but we don't yet have the space-based measurements to confirm the velocity of propagation of gravity), then we know the time of flight for that force. For EM waves (such as the PNN drive I mentioned, and the EMDrive) they are working in the GHz range, where the wavelength will be of the order of cm (2.4GHz is around 12cm), getting a 1/4-wave difference is quite a small distance. At 5.8GHz (where transmitters are cheaply available) a 1/4 wave is around 13mm. That's significantly long enough at that frequency for the flight-time to need to be taken into account, but short enough to make the device small enough to test.

The conclusion, from the delay between momentum being put into the field and being taken out again, must be that momentum is not in fact a conserved quantity, but just appears to be because earlier experiments weren't sensitive enough to see the difference. Using higher frequencies and shorter wavelengths can thus expose the lack of conservation of momentum, since the field can source and sink momentum.

I'm not sure what effect this will have on QI. Where we're talking about the low accelerations at the edge of a galaxy, then it's likely that the imprecise conservation of momentum won't affect this. When we're talking about the EMDrive, though, the ability of the EM fields to source or sink momentum may be important and it seems likely we won't need an artificial horizon to produce thrust, but instead it's only necessary to get the fields in the right configuration relative to the currents/voltages. Nice if we can make an artificial horizon, of course, since that could be more effective, but we can still get a "reactionless" space drive anyway because momentum is not precisely conserved.

tammor said...

Hi Mike,

Bad news.

NASA’s EM-drive is a magnetic WTF-thruster

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/nasas-em-drive-is-a-magnetic-wtf-thruster/

Mike McCulloch said...

Tammor: No. Tajmar has only shown that a signal that is about 50 times smaller than the expected emdrive thrust could be magnetic in origin.

xtal said...

Can you post up a Bitcoin address for donations?

Laurence Cox said...

Mike,

If I had been Tajmar, instead of trying to shield the conductors better, I would have put Helmholtz coils around the whole equipment and looked at whether the 'thrust' changes with applied magnetic field. The problem with shielding is you never know for certain if you have missed something if the effect fails to disappear. I am reminded of the FTL neutrinos which turned out to be a loose BNC plug in the timing circuit.