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

Thursday 15 December 2016

Game over for dark matter

Back in 2006 when I had not yet published MiHsC / quantised inertia, I went to an evening seminar at Exeter University by someone who'd been sitting in the Boulby Mine in Yorkshire for ten years, isolated from cosmic radiation, looking for (hoping to detect) dark matter. Afterwards, being the tactful person I am, I went up to him and said that I had an alternative to dark matter. It is a tribute to the centuries of civilisation we stand on, that he didn't go for my throat, and we discussed things in a rational manner. Back then, I already believed, somehow, that quantised inertia would replace dark matter, but I did not have solid observational proof. I now have a lot of evidence, including this plot:

The plot shows the expected Newtonian rotational acceleration of stars orbiting in galaxies on the x axis, and that observed on the y axis. The line predicted by Newton is of course the diagonal dotted one (expected=observed). The data, binned from 153 galaxies in the SPARC catalogue, that was sent to me recently by Prof Stacy McGaugh, is shown by the grey squares. It shows that at low accelerations (at the outer edges of galaxies, left hand side of the plot) the acceleration is higher than expected: the squares are above the diagonal line. This means that galaxies spin too fast for Newtonian gravity and they should explode with centrifugal force. This would be a cool, but brief, sight to see, but they don't explode. They just sit there, anomalously spinning too fast. The old solution to this of course is to arbitrarily add dark matter to the galaxies to hold them in by gravitational force, rather as governor Tarkin tried to hold The Empire together by force, but this is obviously bogus because you have to add a different arbitrary amount of dark matter to each galaxy.

The solid line in this plot shows the predictions of MoND, which has been fitted to the data by varying its adjustable parameter a0, so it's not that big a deal that it fits. It has been made to fit by that adjustment, and without a physical reason, but it is at least less adjustable than dark matter. 

The dashed line shows the prediction of quantised inertia (MiHsC) using only the visible matter, the co-moving diameter of the cosmos, and the speed of light: all well-known parameters that are unadjustable. Quantised inertia (MiHsC) therefore beats dark matter and MoND in fitting this data without any adjustment at all. This is why I claim dark matter is finished, and why I claim that quantised inertia explains the empirical relation that was MoND. A paper on this is now going though review, but really it is only a slight update to the paper I published back in 2012 (see references). The title of this paper (Testing quantised inertia on galactic scales) had a pun (double meaning) that I was proud of, but no-one seemed to notice (galactic scales could imply size, or weighing scales for inertial mass. Ho ho ho!). Hopefully the new paper will be published soon and noticed, and all that dark matter funding can be put to better use, and that guy down the mine, who usefully got a null result, can finally get some vitamin D.

References

McCulloch, M.E., 2012. Testing quantised inertia on galactic scales. ApSS, 342, 2, 675. http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.7007

2 comments:

Unknown said...

How would you characterize the relationship between the concepts quantized action and quantized inertia?

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