I've suggested (& published in 21 journal papers) a new theory called quantised inertia (or MiHsC) that assumes that inertia is caused by horizons damping quantum fields. It predicts galaxy rotation & lab thrusts without any dark stuff or adjustment. My University webpage is here, I've written a book called Physics from the Edge and I'm on twitter as @memcculloch. Most of my content is at patreon now: here

Tuesday 6 September 2016

A marriage of relativity & quantum mechanics

I'm often accused of being a radical, but I'd like to point out that MiHsC is actually far less radical than dark matter. Consider dark matter. Its supporters believe that 96% of the universe is in the form of a new and invisible form of matter and energy that has a weird structure, as dark matter for example must cling to the edges of galaxies and stay away from their centres, so it needs an entirely new dark-sector physics to explain it.

In the meantime, MiHsC says only that we need to fully accept both relativity and quantum mechanics and therefore the horizons and Unruh waves that they have already predicted and, here's the crucial new bit: assume that inertial mass (never understood before, and Higgs only predicts 0.01% of it) is caused by the Unruh waves being modified by the horizons. The result is a dynamics far better than the usual one since it predicts all dwarf galaxies, spirals and clusters without any tuning, whereas the dark matter hypothesis needs a new type of matter and its physics to be added, and a different amount for each galaxy. This is why it is strange that dark matter-ists accuse MiHsC of being a weird theory out of the blue. The pot calling the kettle black.

MiHsC is simply a particular marriage of relativity and quantum mechanics that happens to predict inertial mass. Of course, people have been trying to marry these two theories off for a long time and have failed because they didn't want to break the equivalence principle or they worried about non-locality, but these breaks are theoretical and not necessarily forbidden by experiment.

The bride (quantum mechanics) and groom (relativity) were first introduced to each other by Hawking, Fulling, Unruh and Davies who predicted Hawking-Unruh radiation. People like Jennison, Milgrom and Haisch and Puthoff offered hints but without a plausible method. I disliked the complexity of the arrangement and suspected there was actually a baby coming (a better model of inertial mass), got my shotgun and rammed the two theories together, and damn the consequences. I've been able to continue because all the consequences that were feared for decades turn out not to disagree with experiment and in fact they predict many of the anomalies that the dark sector was invented to fudge. It just shows that sometimes you just have to suck it and see.

To make this point even more simple mathematically than before, I've recently submitted a paper showing I can derive MiHsC (with an annoying factor of 1.26 probably caused by my simplification of the shape of the Rindler horizon) in 10 lines just from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and special relativity, similar to my approach to gravity in 2014 (see ref). So I'm just waiting patiently for the standard first rejection...

References

McCulloch, M.E., 2014. Gravity from the uncertainty principle. A&SS, 349, 957-959. Video

14 comments:

DataPacRat said...

Is it possible for you to share your submitted paper with your readers, before it's gone through the review process?

Mumrah said...

Have you seen this nonsense

https://astronomynow.com/2016/09/08/new-research-reveals-hundreds-of-undiscovered-black-holes/

I bet what actually happened is that the gravity didn't add up but they knew that dark matter wasn't a viable option so they fell back on another 'dark' explanation.

Perhaps MiHsC can explain this one too?

Mike McCulloch said...

DataPacRat: Sorry, I'm a bit uncomfortable releasing it yet. I usually wait for acceptance at a journal.. then I'll put it on arxiv or research gate asap.

Mike McCulloch said...

Mumrah: Thanks for that, I needed a laugh. As you say, they cannot use dark matter in globulars so they have used black holes instead. It is worse than nonsense. At least nonsense can be exposed, but with this kind of ad hoc invisible explanation how can you falsify it? How can you prove there isn't a bevy of invisible black holes there? Very difficult. And who'd be daft enough to try, except me :)

Milky Way satellite dwarf galaxies are similar and I've submitted a paper showing that MiHsC predicts them without dark matter or any fudging, and, as you say, these globulars deserve a look too, but I'm still trying to get papers on: MiHsC in dwarf galaxies, the proton radius anomaly, the EPR paradox, MiHsC and Proxima Centauri and MiHsC from uncertainty through review.

tyy said...

Unfortunately, you theory seems an ad-hoc design to explain some phenomena, while conveniently ignoring others. This is not how physics is done, Mike.

FiVa said...

@tyy
Could you specify what phenomenas are ignored?

I'm interested in your arguments, but "This is not how physics is done" and "my crackpot detectors are vibrating" from your last post makes it difficult to follow your argumentation.

Just saying. Would give Mike a chance to give you an answer.

Czeko said...

@tyy
But dark matter isn't an ad-hoc design to explain some phenomena?

Zephir said...

>*A marriage of relativity & quantum mechanics"*

This is correct interpretation, but we should be aware, that these two theories already give different predictions, i.e. these ones which differ in many orders of magnitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_catastrophe

The equations which already give different solutions cannot be combined without risk of inconsistencies soon or later.

Mike McCulloch said...

Zephir: Good point, but MiHsC (horizon mechanics?) solves some of the problems you hint at. For example MiHsC should make renormalisation unnecessary (at least for inertial mass) since inertia only exists in MiHsC as a 'difference' in the field, so problematic infinities will not occur..

Mike McCulloch said...

Bav83: You're right that questions should be specific and scientific.

qraal said...

The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it."

Whitehead was on to something with that one.

phildelltablet said...

Dear Mike,

I look forward to your publication, so that we can amend our computer models, and run a decent large simulation to see what changes...!


PD

Mike McCulloch said...

qraal: Good comment by Whitehead. Though he was a philosopher, so I'd amend it slightly to 'Seek predictive simplicity..'.

qraal said...

An initial theory should be complex enough to explain the data, but no more so. Our confidence that it's viable then increases with the more phenomena that can be predicted from the theory that are unrelated to the initial data. Dark Matter/Gravity theories that explain rotation curves (etc) but nothing else are kind of boring - eg. MOND, MOG. Your theory, which explains a gaggle of disparate phenomena, is more attractive as it's not a "one-trick pony" kind of theory. It's a potential new insight into how the world works. Maybe the current derivation needs work (mathematical physicists have conniptions when it's *too* simple) but that's good enough for a first-pass approximation.

However there's a lot of theories and a lot of "...and the kitchen sink" kind of theorising, which claim *too much* as predictions of the theory. The trendy claim that, for example, Darwinism can apply to a multitude of phenomena other than the population dynamics of self-replicating entities, is an egregious example.