In spring last year (6th April) I was asked to visit St Andrew's Physics and Astronomy Department to talk about MiHsC. Well, the reality is I managed to get myself invited because I had met one of them, Dr HongSheng Zhao, at an Alternative Gravities conference in 2006.
Prof Keith Horne kindly organised my visit, and it was a fruitful in some ways, although nothing came of it regarding collaboration. At lunch, before I was to give my talk, one incisive chap, whose name I forget, rattled me by asking me whether the Unruh waves I use to generate inertia could penetrate a metal box (Faraday box). This is something I thought about years ago and I eventually decided that MiHsC-inertia would be unaffected by a metal box, since the Unruh waves for the accelerations we see on Earth are 10^16 metres long and should be able to penetrate (submarines can pick up very long EM waves deep under the conducting sea). The consensus round the table was that the EM component that I was focusing on could not penetrate, but other components of the Unruh radiation could.
Later at coffee, one chap (C.Hooley) suggested that what might be possible is that the sub-selection of Unruh waves by the Hubble scale Casimir effect, that I use in MiHsC, might be already tuned into the local space (like a curvature?) and so wouldn't have to get into the metal box and this would also solve the communication with the cosmic boundary problem. I also wonder if the waves might actually get in through the time dimension rather than the spatial (the same thing?). If only I had access to these kind of stimulating conversations every day! Anyway, disregarding for the moment how nature actually does it, the Hubble scale Casimir effect does seem to work for the specific experiments I've looked at so far. Keith asked whether I'd tried to get gravity from MiHsC too, using a sheltering method. I have now tried this and it produced the wrong kind of dependences, but another method is proving more successful..
When I left Keith said that I'd 'Provided some entertainment and given them something to think about'. I wish I had more opportunity to interact with other physicists. I value tricky questions: in my experience progress comes after crises of doubt.
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