A Foresight Workshop in San Francisco

Last week I traveled all the way to San Francisco to attend the Foresight Institute's Space Workshop. The meeting was held at the HQ of the 50 Years VC firm by the Randall Museum. It was a modern building and very St Francis: soft pillows, intense light, vegetarian buffets (nice!), beautiful views, small nooks with Buddha statues in them... The atmosphere was relaxed but highly organised.

I gave my talk, saying that QI has been proven without a doubt in space (galaxies and wide binaries), it predicts that we can get propellant-less thrust, lab tests are backing this which means we can get a probe to the Oort cloud in a year and Proxima Centauri in 10 or so. They also asked me for a challenge and offhand I said "How to fund a Horizon Institute to work on and apply QI". I felt then that this was a little selfish, but given I am losing my university post, it was the problem I had come here to solve so I let it stand. Anyway, several people voted for it and it came second and was combined with Robert Zubrin's challenge for a Mars Institute to work on colonisation by doing things first on Earth and Creon Levit's welcome plan for the Mavericks' Institute. We were called Team 1.

The next day we had a grievance session in which Zubrin repeated his interesting comment that NASA has the same budget in the 2010s it had in the 60s for Apollo but is no longer "storming the heavens", and there should be a property office for space to encourage space mining and a new gold rush. Creon Levit said that universities and institutions no longer tolerate mavericks, which is very true. I pointed out that after I published something on the Podkletnov effect I was banned from the arXiv, which is not to say I necessarily believe the Podkletnov effect, but an academic must have the right to look at anomalies without cancellation, otherwise the old theories are never going to be tested and improved.

We were then divided into our Teams. Team 1 met: Creon Levit, Robert Zubrin, Larry Lemke & I. In the relaxed surroundings and leadership from Creon, the group decided the best way forward was for Larry to test a QI capacitor drive in a 1U cubesat setup. Geffen Avraham then sat down next to me and offered to launch it! I offered of course to provide advice. Put the right people together on a comfy sofa and see what happens. We presented our plan to all, as did other groups, and there was a vote using Feynman Bucks. Our plan won the nominal 1st Prize of $3000.

The other groups had suggested projects involving Mike Grace's shoot-cargo-into-space (a brilliant idea that fits his larger than life character perfectly and that he is developing - he took people to see his hypersonic accelerator), proving on-orbit robot manufacture by building a long space stick (astronomer Martin Elvis was not happy) , investigating the biological dangers of colonising Mars, and the Mars Institute devoted to doing it (Zubrin and Carol Stoker have a long running debate about this). As a coda, it was suggested in jest that we could combine all these, by launching with Mike Grace's space gun, building the stick, using QI to get it to Mars, whereupon Carol Carol and Zubrin could debate whether it should land.

Overall, it was a great example of how a shared vision, a relaxing environment and first class organisation can lead to positive results. Thank you to the Foresight Team.

PS: Thanks to a doctor, a nurse & the flight crew on my way to San Francisco who probably saved my life.

How QI gets rid of the Gravitational Constant, Big G

Inertia has never been understood, it has just been assumed that “Things keep going in a straight line, unless you push on them”, but why? Quantised inertia (QI) explains why.

This diagram shows an object (the black circle) accelerating to the left. Quantum mechanics states that all accelerated objects see a warm bath of thermal (random) radiation called Unruh radiation (orange) that has now been observed at CERN (Lynch et al., 2021). Relativity states that information from the far right will never catch up to the object since it is limited to the speed of light (c) (the black area to the right). The new assumption of quantised inertia (QI) is that the object & horizon (edge of the black) damp the Unruh radiation between them, as in the Casimir effect (the blue area) so more radiation pushes the object from the left than the right – this model predicts inertia (McCulloch, 2013).

QI also explains galaxy rotation without dark matter, since at a galaxy’s edge the accelerations are tiny so the waves of Unruh radiation get too long to fit inside the observable cosmos (size=Θ), so they cannot exist (Mach: what you cannot ever perceive you should assume does not exist). There is no doubt that it is QI & not dark matter that explains galaxy rotation since the galaxy rotation problems starts at the exact radius where the Unruh waves get as long as the cosmos (McCulloch, 2017). This also predicts a minimum acceleration for nature of 2c^2/Θ.

This is how QI gets rid of the need for the gravitational constant G. The lower the acceleration, the longer the Unruh waves. Physics must act to make sure that the length of the Unruh waves is less than the cosmic diameter, so in any volume there must be at least enough gravity to keep the acceleration above the minimum acceleration, so

GM/r^2 >(2c^2)/Θ

Since Θ=2r and we’ll assume it is on the threshold, then

G=(c^2 Θ)/2M

This relation has long been known to work (try putting numbers in). Now quantised inertia explains it. Since we know the speed of light, c, the cosmic size Θ (to 10%) and the cosmic mass, to within a factor of 10, from counting galaxies, we can calculate G and replace G in all the equations with the right hand side above. This new physics also predicts that G varies in time, as Θ increases. So, next time someone mentions the gravitational constant, tell them it isn't, and furthermore that it is not needed at all!

References

McCulloch, M.E., 2013. Inertia from an asymmetric Casimir effect. EPL, 101, 59001. Link

McCulloch, M.E., 2017. Galaxy rotations from quantised inertia and visible matter only. Astro. Sp. Sci., 362,149. Link

Lynch, M.H., et al, 2021. Experimental observations of acceleration-induced thermality. Phys. Rev. D., 104, 025015. Link

A Quantised Inertia Drive is to be Launched to LEO by SpaceX

I’ve been in the ‘New Physics’ arena for 17 years now, and things keep getting weirder. When I started out in 2006, peer reviewers of my early papers were of the opinion that they didn’t exactly believe QI but it was more likely than dark matter, they could not find anything logically wrong and the theory agreed with the data, so that was that. In other words, they put logic and facts before mere opinion.

Today, an article appeared on Universe Today (see below from the Wayback Machine) reporting two factual events that I’ve had to keep quiet about for months due to an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement). The first is that a US company that I have been liaising with, called IVO Ltd, tested a QI thruster in a professional vacuum chamber and found it to agree with the QI theory. The quote from IVO CEO, Richard Mansell was “All Quantum Drives showed thrust consistent with predicted Quantized Inertial calculations. Control Drives confirmed that thrust measurements were not consistent with any other known forces.” The second piece of news was that they are to launch a QI drive on a SpaceX rocket on June 10th for a test in space. I was pleased that at last I could talk about these two pieces of news, but a few hours later the article had been deleted due to pressure apparently from ‘some physicists’ who doubted the QI theory. 

Who are these titans of physics who can erase facts that threaten their opinions within a few hours?! That would be like suppressing all news of the next SpaceX launch because you don’t believe in space: let them at least test the idea. Let’s hope this essay does not also magically disappear...

The article has of course been saved by the great Wayback Machine: Link

Kudos to Universe Today. They have republished the article with more balance. 'Tis here: Newlink

The Bullet Cluster May Prove QI

The Bullet cluster has been a poster child for the dark side for years. The cluster is shown below (Source: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss - Chandra X-Ray Observatory). The pink areas show the lit matter that can be seen through a telescope, ie: that actually exists. The idea is that the pink 'bullet' on the right has smashed through the pink 'target' on the left and is still moving rightwards.

Using the stars behind the cluster and distortions in them, it is possible to find out the amount of light bending (lensing) going on in the field of view and therefore, they assume, the invisible mass that is there. This is shown by the blue areas. This is their dark matter. For years they have been saying that the Bullet cluster proves the existence of dark matter because the dark is obviously separated from the visible.

However, it was very clear to me that this system is spinning. The bullet at least is spinning, as real bullets do, around the axis which is horizontal, and the blue areas look as if they are along that spin axis. This is a clear prediction of quantised inertia, see my flyby anomaly paper (ref 1) in which space probes speed up near to the Earth's spin axis. This is a schematic of the cluster:

I'd been mulling this over for years, but last year I asked a student to find some data on these clusters (masses and radii) and then I calculated where the acceleration would be as low as 2x10^-10 m/s^2, calculating on a grid and adding both the gravitational accelerations (GM/r^2) and mutual rotational acceleration (v^2/r). This QI-zone is present of course in all regions away from the cluster but is especially large in just the areas shown by blue in the famous diagram (see the blue in both diagrams above). The hypothesis is that along the spin axis mutual acceleration are very low and QI bends light there, mimicking the effect of matter.

They used to ask "Can MoND take a Bullet?" Well, MoND can't, but QI seems to do fine.

References

McCulloch, M.E., 2008. Modelling the flyby anomalies using a modification of inertia. MNRAS Letters, 389 (1), L57-60

A Solution for the Hubble Tension.

The sound of an object moving away from you will shift to a lower frequency as the waves from your point of view are spread out. This is the Doppler effect and applies to light waves as well. Edwin Hubble noticed that the light from distant galaxies was red shifted, that is, the wavelength of the light we received from them was longer, implying in a similar way that the galaxies were moving away and that the further ones were moving away faster. This was taken to mean that all the galaxies were moving away from a common centre as if there had been a Big Bang 13.6 billion years in the past. There are other ways to view it as well in QI, but let's stick with this image for simplicity for now.

Looking at local galaxies, the Hubble expansion rate has been measured to be 73 km/s/Mpc. That is, galaxies one megaparsec (Mpc) away from us are apparently moving away from us at 73 km/s. Recently, a new method was devised to predict the Hubble constant from observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background, that represents the cosmos at a redshift of Z=1000, and then extrapolate forward using standard models assuming dark matter and dark energy. Perhaps not surprisingly they predicted a slower cosmos: 67.7 km/s/Mpc. The difference between these values is now beyond a plausible level of chance, so it is a real problem (See Ref).

Now let us calculate what part of this predicted Hubble constant they would miss given that they do not include the extra acceleration due to quantised inertia. It would be 2x10-10 m/s2 over the lifetime of the universe (4.4x1017s) at the cosmic edge (radius = 4.4x1026m). OK. So what would it be at only 1Mpc distance (1Mpc = 3x1022m)?

dH = 2x10^-10 x 3x10^22 x 4.4x10^17 / 4.4x10^26 = 6 km/s/Mpc

The observed discrepancy in the Hubble constant is 5.3 km/s/Mpc. Nice!

For headaches and Hubble tension, just take QI!

References

Riess, A. et al., 2019. Large Magellanic Cloud Cepheid Standards Provide a 1% Foundation for the Determination of the Hubble Constant and Stronger Evidence for Physics beyond ΛCDM. The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 876, Issue 1, article id. 85, 13 pp.

On the Cusp?

For the past five months my Chief Engineer (Richard Arundal) and myself have been busy in the lab attempting to prove that one can extract propellant-less thrust from a capacitor by using quantised inertia. QI thrust is implied theoretically (McCulloch, 2013, 2017), but a capacitor approach was first suggested and tested by Becker and Bhatt (2018) who had read my paper on thrust and dielectrics (2017) and did some lab tests in liaison with me. Their work has been seconded by Mansell/IVO Ltd.

Curious to test this approach I used the last remaining DARPA money to set up a lab at Plymouth University, hiring Richard. What we now have in the lab is shown above, with a few details withheld for IP reasons. The capacitor (blue plates with orange dielectric) is placed on an insulating tower on a digital balance on a heavy damping plate. The capacitor is charged up to 5 kV with a HiPot tester (on top) via wires that pass their current through Galinstan, a cool liquid metal that breaks the physical connection to the outside world and allows the capacitor to ‘float free’ on the balance.

For the past month we have been struggling with an unwanted electrostatic force, but we noticed an asymmetry as we flipped the capacitor. Recently I have looked at all the data and used maths (including matrix algebra, that I always wanted to use for something useful!) to separate out the EM force from the asymmetrical one. This extracted force is towards the anode and looks like QI. It is about 10 milligrams, only 1/3 of the force predicted (McCulloch, 2021) but there are good reasons why that might be, and we will now look at those.

In short, unless we can think of another effect that could cause a force towards the anode, then we have it and the transport & energy industry will never be the same.

References

Becker, F.M. and A.S. Bhatt, 2018. Electrostatic accelerated electrons within symmetric capacitors during field emission condition events exert bidirectional propellant-less thrust. Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04368

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

McCulloch, M.E., 2017. Testing quantised inertia on emdrives with dielectrics. EPL, 118, 34003.  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1209/0295-5075/118/34003

McCulloch., 2021. Thrust from symmetrical capacitors. Preprint: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353481953_Thrust_from_Symmetric_Capacitors_using_Quantised_Inertia (submitted to Adv.Sp. Res.)

Glimpses of QI in the Lab?

Starting in mid-June, Richard Arundal and I have completed 45 experiments, charging up capacitors 4x4 cm in area with either kapton or Polyethylene dielectrics between the plates. We have been carefully eliminating pesky artifacts, through trial and error, along with the appropriate amount of engineering, er, 'jargon', and taking readings with increasing accuracy. Here I summarise the cleanest data we have so far. The plot below shows the change in thrust up the y axis (a positive value is always a thrust towards the capacitor's anode) for eight runs. As we increase the voltage and move along the x axis, each point represents the weight change we saw (in grams) when we stepped the Voltage up by 100V. QI predicts that when we reach somewhere around the breakdown voltage for the capacitor, which is very uncertain but may be around 1 kV for the thin kapton and 1.5 kV for the thicker polyethylene, there should be a thrust towards the anode, ie: a shift up on the graph.

The first two cases shown: x27 and x28 (blue squares) used the polyethylene dielectric (30 micron). In plain English this means 'the plastic from plastic bags', and QI predicts (McCulloch, 2021) that the thrust should be

F = 0.00014IA/d^2

where I is the leakage current between the plates, A is the plate area and d is the plate separation. If we assume that the leakage current = 10^-9 x voltage (which fits what we have seen with our measurements of voltage & leakage current) then

F = 0.00014 x 10^-9 x VA/d^2

So

dF/dV = 0.00014 x 10^-9 x A/d^2

To convert force in Newtons to grams we multiply by 100 and then by another 100 to get from g/V to g/100V. For the 4x4, 30 micron dielectric then we have 0.002 grams/100V (100V was our increment). This fits the x27 and x28 data (blue squares) as the peak at 1.6-1.9 kV reaches just above 0.002 g/100V. The peak thrust from these two capacitors is at a likely breakdown point.

The other runs show the 7 micron kapton dielectric runs (blue-red circles). Those that do show a positive peak: x38, x43 and maybe x45 show it at 1-1.3 kV which fits because these capacitors are thinner and should break down at lower voltage. From the equation above, the kapton should produce 0.046 grams/100V and that is close to what we saw. The faint box represents the area I expect for the QI thrust. It is uncertain in the x direction as the quoted breakdown voltages of dielectrics have a large range.

One problem remaining is that we do not yet have a perfect example of turning the capacitor over and getting a reverse thrust. We can maybe see that in x37, x45 and especially x48 which were reversed but the peaks are small and these runs were not very clean (x45 was drifting well before 0.1kV was reached). x48 gave us a sustained peak at the right time, but there was a brief glitch while powering up.

In summary, we have a few positive peaks which are encouraging. So is the fact that the kapton runs show both a lower break down voltage and a higher thrust than the polyethylene. Are these peaks due to QI? If so, the world has changed, but time will tell. We need a good clean reversal of force. Richard Arundal has been excellent - he is a skilled engineer who does not give up. Please go and see his youtube channel linked below. The last six weeks have been a roller coaster, but with a slow geological scale uplift.

References

McCulloch, M.E., 2021. Thrust from symmetric capacitors using quantised inertia: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353481953_Thrust_from_Symmetric_Capacitors_using_Quantised_Inertia

Arundal, R., 2022. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO00nPk5WkpV0ggLGLnHHiQ