One-wave MiHsC and the EmDrive

MiHsC (see an introduction) assumes that inertia is caused by a radiation pressure from Unruh radiation, and that the waves of this radiation are only allowed to exist if they have nodes at information horizons like the Rindler (local) or Hubble (cosmic) horizon, because if they didn't have nodes there, we could infer what lies behind the horizon and it wouldn't be a horizon (logic/information affects local physics).

So far with MiHsC I've used an approximation, and assumed that as accelerations decrease, then the number of waves in the Unruh spectrum decreases linearly as they are disallowed by the horizon, and so the inertial mass decreases in a new way (predicting galaxy rotation without dark matter...etc). I can get away with this because the accelerations are rarely small enough that only one or two Unruh waves fit.

To apply MiHsC to the resonating emdrive (a truncated metal cone), and probably to very low cosmic accelerations too, I need to consider individual Unruh waves. So I have recently tried an alternative approximation of MiHsC that assumes that there is only one wave at the peak of the Unruh radiation spectrum and this wave either fits or doesn't within the horizon (which for the emdrive, is its walls). This leads to a prediction for the anomalous force on the emdrive (F) like this

F = -PQ/c * (|sin(pi*w_small/L)|-|sin(pi*w_big/L)|)

where P is the input power, Q is the quality factor, c is the speed of light, w_big and w_small are the diameters of the big and small end plates of the emdrive, and L is its length. As you can see I'm using the magnitude of a sin function to decide whether the Unruh wave (only one now) fits within the walls or not, at the wide end and the narrow end. This Table shows how the results differ from what I had before:

Experiment       Observed      MiHsC2d    OnewaveMiHsC
                                     ----  milliNewtons ----
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shawyer 1             16               4.1              7.7
Shawyer 2           147           148.9            54.7
Cannae drive           9               5.3              4.3
Juan et al. A         214           154               39
Juan et al. B         315            241              61
NASA B1                 0.09          0.26            0.07
NASA B2                 0.05          0.63            0.18
NASA B3                 0.06          0.12            0.03
NASA vacuum        0.03          0.70            0.20

As you can see, I've used the 2d (two-dimensional) version of spectrum-MiHsC to compare with the 2d one-wave MiHsC, for a fair comparison. I've shown the Cannae and Juan (2012) cases in red because I'm not confident I have the right geometry for them. MiHsC predicts that (usually) photons are more likely to see a resonating Unruh wave at the wide end, so the photons' inertia increases as they go towards the wide end and to conserve momentum the whole cone then has to move the other way. As you can see, the new formulation is much better for the NASA data but worse for the more powerful of the Shawyer experiments (I still don't know the uncertainties in the data).

Interestingly, this approach predicts there can be a reverse mode for the emdrive (not a particularly bold prediction I admit since NASA may have seen a reverse already). MiHsC predicts this reverse occurs if you 'tune' the Unruh waves to fit better into the narrow end.

I've been trying to develop a one-wave version of MiHsC for application to cosmology for ages, the emdrive is useful (if real) because it provides data on which to test progress.

My earlier blogs on the Emdrive can be accessed here.