Response to John Baez: 1

Here are my responses to John Baez who wrote a blog criticising MiHsC as applied to the emdrive and other things. I sincerely appreciate his comments and they are useful since they show up what is not yet understood by the mainstream about MiHsC. Indeed, his criticisms are based mostly on a lack of understanding of MiHsC, and can be refuted. Below I have copied the most pertinent comments from his blog (in quotes and italic, see also the blog link below) and responded:

"So the inertial mass of an object is caused  by the Unruh radiation?   Okay... yup, that's certainly new.   Let me just say there's no evidence for this."

I have shown that by assuming that inertia IS caused by Unruh radiation (made non-uniform by horizons) I can suddenly predict the anomalies that have baffled mainstream physics, for example: galaxy rotation without dark matter, cosmic acceleration...etc. This constitutes evidence.

"[The Casimir effect] is a reasonably large force when the plates are a few nanometers apart, but it rapidly becomes weaker as you move them farther apart.   So now imagine they're as far apart as most distant galaxies we can see...."

This shows a misunderstanding of MiHsC. The new effects are not to do with the separation of galaxies, but due to the Unruh waves (which are very long for accelerations as low as those at the edge of galaxies) which are disallowed by the Hubble horizon. For the size argument, see my next comment.

"at rather small accelerations the Unruh effect is so tiny that the thermal radiation has wavelengths even larger than the size of the observable Universe.  That's true.  And that of course means that this effect is even more absurdly weak than in the example I gave."

In fact, I'm saying that these larger-than-Hubble-scale Unruh waves logically cannot exist. Yes, the predicted effect is usually incredibly small, but since the accelerations in the edges of galaxies are so tiny anyway, MiHsC makes a detectable difference. Also, it is not the Unruh effect alone that I am implicating in inertia but the way information horizons make the Unruh radiation non-uniform in space so that new dynamics/energy can be got out of it. An analogy for the way MiHsC does this, that I used in my book, is that horizons are selecting/deselecting or tuning Unruh waves (quantum vacuum) in a similar way to how my fingers select particular acoustic waves (nodes, notes) when I play my flute, or when a guitarist plays a guitar.

"Again, two things stand out: 1) it doesn't work like this"

I realise this is meant half-jokingly but of course it is not valid to argue that a theory is wrong, just because you believe it's wrong.

"Planck's constant - the number that shows up in every calculation in quantum mechanics - never shows up in this paper.  So McCulloch is not actually doing anything with the Unruh effect!"

Planck's constant is in there, but since E=hc/lambda and the lambda (wavelength) has been constrained via resonance to be proportional to the length of the cavity L, it is possible to write E=hc/2L and so h can be broken up and written in terms of E, c and L which is what I did implicitly in the paper.

"So his photons have mass - and on top of that, the mass changes with time: see his Equation 4!"

It is well known that photons must have inertial mass, it is just rest mass they lack. As experimental proof, light sails depend on the momentum transfer from light which requires inertial mass. Theoretically Einstein showed that energy is equivalent to inertial mass. Photons have energy, so they must have inertial mass.

I hope John Baez and others read this, and come back with a more empirical set of criticisms. That is how it works.

References

John Baez' blog: Link (scroll down to 'bad physics')

My MiHsC-emdrive paper on the arXiv:  https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.03449