What is an electron?

What is an electron? This is the title of a jem of an article written in Wireless World back in 1979 by Prof Roger C. Jennison (see references). Someone sent me the pdf a year or so ago and I have been dipping into it from time to time, increasingly excited and amazed by it.

Roger Jennison made the fascinating point that electrons look very much like photons locked in a self made trap (somehow). For example, when an electron and a positron collide, they annihilate cleanly and out come two oppositely-polarised photons. Also, if you fire photons of slowly-decreasing wavelength at the vicinity of something like a heavy nucleus, suddenly, when the photon wavelength reaches 2.4x10^-12 metres, out comes a positron and an electron (pair production). Why this particular wavelength? See below!

The obvious conclusion is that electrons are made of photons and Jennison took this further by modelling an electron as a photon trapped in a cavity, as shown in the schematic below.

Imagine the photon bounces around inside (the blue waves) pushing the cavity plates (black lines) outwards, and you charge the plates positively and negatively so they attract electrostatically to balance the outward push. This is now a stable, static system.

Now imagine you push the cavity externally from the left to the right (black arrow). Now the photon that is just bouncing off the left wall (the light blue wave) is given more energy by the wall pushing it, and the super-energetic wave then pushes the right wall, so it moves too. As the photon bounces back (dark blue wave) it has lost energy so it has less energy when it gets back to the left hand wall and so pulls that wall rightwards. Now if you take away the initial push, this process continues so that the cavity continues to move rightwards, and so this predicts inertia: the cavity keeps going at constant speed unless pushed on. Jennison's model predicts a lot of other photon properties as well, for example its half classical spin, and it predicts a new effect: changes in speed occur in discrete jumps and that when you use photons of wavelength 2.4x10^-12m then the size of the jumps is Planck's constant, which may explain why that wavelength is crucial.

The model is not complete however, because it is unclear what the cavity walls are made of. They're not likely to be made of a conductive shell. The new point I'd like to make is that quantised inertia might be able to answer this: the cavity walls might be the relativistic horizons seen by the photon as it orbits. For objects like photons (if they are objects) an acceleration towards a centre causes the creation of a cylindrical relativistic horizon, from the electrons' point of view, rather like a wall outside the orbit. Could this complete Jennison's electron model? This also makes me think of course of the origin of other particles (higher modes?), the emdrive cavity and also ball lightning..

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Michael C. Fidler who sent me the Jennison paper last year, and to John Dorman and others for online discussions on this matter.

References

Jennison, R.C., 1979. What is a electron? Wireless World, June (Link to pdf, thanks to Tom Short).

Quantised Inertia from Fundamentals

The uncertainty principle of Heisenberg is usually written as dp.dx~hbar and it says that the uncertainty in momentum of a quantum object (dp) times its uncertainty in position (dx) is always a constant (hbar). If a quantum object knows well where it is (dx=small), then it loses the ability to know its speed (dp=big). Conversely, if it knows its speed very well (dp=small), it'll be lost in space (dx=big). This relation from quantum mechanics, and special relativity also, are two clues that physics is due to be reworked around the concept of information. This is what quantised inertia does, joining these two pillars of physics (QM and relativity) on the large scale.

Imagine a red mass (see diagram, top part, red circle). Suddenly you put another mass on the left of it (the black circle). The uncertainty of position of the red mass is shown by the black quadrilateral around it. The red mass can see a large amount of empty space up, down and rightwards (forgetting directions perpendicular to the page for now) so its uncertainty in position (dx) is large in those directions because it cannot position itself well in empty space. However, it can see less far into space to the left because the other mass blocks its view, so its uncertainty of position that way (dx) is lower. The quadrilateral represents dx in each direction. It is skewed outwards to the up, down and right where dx is large, and skewed in to the left where dx is small. Therefore, according to Heisenberg, the quadrilateral showing the uncertainty in momentum has to be the opposite: skewed out to the left and skewed in for the other directions (see the blue envelope). Since momentum involves speed, this predicts that it is statistically or quantum mechanically more likely that the object will move to the left. In a formal derivation I have shown this not only looks like gravity but predicts it (see reference below).

Now, as the red object approaches the black one (see lower panel) its uncertainty in position (dx) to the left gets ever smaller, so dp must increase and the red object must accelerate. "Aha!" Says the other great fundamental pillar of physics: relativity, "I now become relevant!". Since the red object is now accelerating away from the space to the right, information from far to the right cannot get to old Red, and a horizon forms (the black line) beyond which is unknowable space for Red. This Rindler horizon is like the black mass. It blocks Red's view and so Red's uncertainty in position to the right reduces (dx, see the black quadrilateral contract from the right) and so the uncertainty in momentum to the right increases (see the blue quadrilateral now extends further to the right). Red now has a chance of moving both left and right and this has the effect of cancelling some of its initial acceleration towards the black mass. This looks like inertia, and indeed it predicts quantised inertia (see reference below).

In this way, you can derive something that looks like quantised inertia (if you consider also the cosmic horizon) and gravity, just by allowing quantum mechanics and relativity to mix at large scales. The whole package could be called horizon mechanics. The word 'horizon' from relativity, the 'mechanics' from the quantum side. As a happy side effect, quantised inertia or horizon mechanics solves a lot of problems in physics that you may have heard of: it explains cosmic acceleration, predicts galaxy rotation without dark matter, and its redshift dependence, and predicts the emdrive. These successes should not be sneezed at, representing 96% of the cosmos, and with the emdrive practically offering a new kind of propulsion. Oddly enough, for a theory intended to replace general relativity, the behaviour I have just described looks quite tensor-ish..

References

McCulloch, M.E., 2016. Quantised inertia from relativity & the uncertainty principle, EPL, 115, 69001. ResearchGate preprint,  arXiv preprint

Easter Thank Yous

Rather than criticising theorists that in my opinion are doing things wrong, which is negative, exhausting and would take far too long :) it is more positive to thank those that I admire and who have inspired me in some technical way. I started this list a while ago and neglected to publish it. I have recently added to it, so here it is:

First of all: John Anderson, the co-discoverer of various spacecraft anomalies and more recently periodic variations in big G, without which I would have had far fewer anomalies to get me interested. I love his style because he publishes carefully analysed anomalous data and honestly points out that 'this is unexplained'. This is rare, and is a gift for a data-driven theorist like me.

Although the influence is not direct, I cannot not mention Stephen Fulling, Paul Davies, Bill Unruh and Stephen Hawking (with help from Zeldovitch, Starobinksy & Bekenstein). The discoverers of Hawking-Unruh radiation, without whom Quantised Inertia (QI) / MiHsC would not be possible.

Haisch, Rueda and Puthoff who in 1994 proposed the first model (stochastic electrodynamics) for how inertial mass might be caused by the zero point field (paper), a model that thrilled me when I first read it on a long train journey, like a chink of light would thrill someone lost in a cave. Later I decided it was the way to go, but wrong (it needs a arbitrary cutoff) and this inspired me towards QI/MiHsC and an asymmetric Casimir effect (aCe) which needs no cut-off. I am thrilled and honoured to now be in email contact with Hal Puthoff.

Mordehai Milgrom, who first suggested that physical laws might be wrong at low acceleration and invented MoND in 1983. Milgrom also speculated on a link between MoND and Unruh radiation but wasn't specific, and then discounted the possibility in 1999 saying Unruh radiation was isotropic so could not generate a force. Although MoND is a huge step up from dark matter, it is not as good as MiHsC because it lacks a specific model and needs a number to be input by hand (QI/MiHsC predicts this number by itself). However, Milgrom's papers on MoND were an inspiration to me, and he also kindly commented on (politely disagreed with) my first paper on MiHsC when I sent a draft to him.

Martin Tajmar who has the rare mix of being open-minded enough to test new anomalies while also being professional about it, and he brings much needed respectability to anomalous experiments. Also, like me, he is lucky enough to be married to a South Korean.

Scarpa et al. (2007) who wrote a brilliant paper on globular clusters (published at the first crisis in cosmology conference) that provided the first empirical evidence I was aware of that dark matter, which I didn't believe anyway, was wrong. The data also shows that QI/MiHsC, which depends on local accelerations, and not MoND which depends on external ones, was the answer.

Stacy McGaugh, who I met at my first astrophysics conference on 'Alternative Gravities' in Edinburgh in 2006, and who was the only one at the workshop who seemed to consider MiHsC seriously. He has been kind enough to send me stellar data from time to time, and I hope he will actually cite me someday! He has recently also co-published important results that falsify dark matter.

Jaume Gine, with whom I published the first collaborative paper on QI/MiHsC in 2016. This joint-paper was submitted to so many journals over a couple of years that I'm grateful for both his input and perseverence. The first paper on QI/MiHsC by another person solo was also recently published by Keith Pickering, and takes a refreshingly modified approach (here). Also, Prof Jose Perez-Diaz, who came to see me last year for a few months, and I enjoyed our many discussions. He is now trying to detect QI/MiHsC using a LEMdrive arrangement.

John Dorman who wrote the first, and incisively entertaining, review of my book, a review that struck truer to home than may be apparent from outside, since I sometimes feel just like a boxer in the ring. I now have it blue-tacked on my study wall. He has been especially quick to understand the central importance of horizons and suggested a new name for the theory: 'horizon mechanics'. This name could be used in future if and when gravity is incorporated, since 'mechanics' implies a complete system.

Finally to go back in time again: I submitted my first paper on MiHsC to the prestigious journal MNRAS in 2006, and fully expected to be rejected since I'd never submitted on astrophysics before (only ocean physics up till then). The reviewer said they "didn't exactly believe MiHsC, but it was more plausible than many alternatives which had been published", so they let it pass, to my great joy. The reviewer was also amused by my use of the word 'forecast' instead of 'prediction' (I worked at the Met Office at the time). If this first paper had been rejected I may have given up.

These are only some of the inspiring folk and someday I'll make a complete list. Thanks to all. Happy Easter!