An abstract for NAM2014

I've just submitted the following abstract to the organiser of the cosmology section of the UK's National Astronomy Meeting (NAM2014). I hope he chooses it! (they didn't)

Title: A toy cosmology from a Hubble-scale Casimir effect.

A new cosmological model is presented here. The model proposes that inertia is caused as follows: as an object accelerates, for example, to the right, a Rindler horizon forms to its left allowing fewer Unruh wavelengths to exist between the object and the horizon. This can be thought of as a Rindler-scale Casimir effect or as ‘horizon wave censorship’ in which partial waves would provide information from behind the horizon so cannot be allowed. This effect suppresses Unruh radiation on the left side of the object causing a net radiative force that opposes its acceleration, predicting the standard inertial mass. In this model, very long wavelengths of Unruh radiation are also suppressed in the same way by a Hubble-scale Casimir effect (or a Hubble-scale censorship) causing a new detectable effect: a loss of inertia at very low accelerations. This effect predicts the cosmic acceleration, and galaxy rotation without dark matter, both without any adjustable parameters. The same model applied to Hawking radiation from the Hubble edge predicts the visible gravitational mass of the cosmos, that this mass increases as it expands, and that it had a hot start: a Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). This model also predicts a suppression of variation on the largest scales in agreement with the low-l CMB anomaly recently seen by the Planck satellite. This cosmological model is preliminary, but is directly testable and a laboratory experiment will be proposed.

Reference: McCulloch, M.E., 2014. A toy cosmology using a Hubble-scale Casimir effect. Galaxies, 2, 81-88. link