So much has happened over the last few months and thanks to my newly-funded collaborators, research into QI is now running on three cylinders instead of one: it was just theory, now the work includes models and experiments as well. My post doc, Dr Jesus Lucio is working very well. I asked him to write a matlab script that simulates wide binaries with ordinary Newtonian physics, and MoND and QI. His script has produced a very nice animation (see below) that shows that when you model a real wide binary, only quantised inertia (red) predicts the stars to be bound together (as they are in reality). Newton and MoND (blue and green) predict wrongly that the two stars should zoom off to infinity, and so they are falsified. He has extended this tool to also simulate the Solar system. It compares the predictions with the observed orbital trajectories. We are having fun simulating Oumuamua at the moment.
The other project I asked him to do is to develop a numerical COMSOL simulation of the asymmetric Casimir effect that underpins quantised inertia (reference 1). The process by which when you accelerate something to the right, say, relativity and the speed of light limit, implies there is a region of space to your left that you can no longer see and a horizon forms that damps the intensified (Unruh) quantum vacuum on the left side of the object leading to a net quantum force that resists the object's acceleration: inertia. Unfortunately COMSOL is having a hard time modelling a particle at the tiny Planck scale (10^-35 metres wide) moving within a cosmos approximately 8.8x10^26 metres wide. So, our first crude plan is to use a particle the size of a galaxy cluster, and then slightly smaller, and we will use the difference to extrapolate down to the Planck scale.
The two experimental teams I employed as part of my funded project are also getting started building light-emdrives. The Dresden team are building resonators, but the Madrid team are already experimenting and have seen some thrust of the hoped-for kind, that is over six sigma outside the noise. However, it will be a long struggle to show it is definitely The Big One. They are now slowly eliminating mundane effects that could also be causing it.
As well as thinking about thrust, I am trying to generalise and further extend QI to explain gravity. After reading a book by A. Unzicker (ref 2), it seems that Einstein may have been on a more QI-compatible course until 1911 when he was redirected into bent space by his geometer friend Marcel Grossman. The variable speed of light version of general relativity (VSL-GR) that Einstein published in 1911 had a flaw at the time, but that flaw was corrected by Dicke (1957) (ref 3) and this version is far simpler and agrees with all the predictions of standard general relativity. This VSL-GR is far more satisfactory to me than normal GR since it relies on a process (slowing photons) that can be measured directly, as opposed to standard GR which relies in bent space, which is an abstract thing that you cannot measure directly, except by virtue of the moving objects it was designed to predict anyway. I have had some success in building a mathematical bridge between quantised inertia and VSL-GR. I am still trying to decide whether the piles I built the bridge on (the assumptions) are solid or not. The best way to do this is to jump up and down on them a lot. I'll let you know if there is a splash.
References
McCulloch, M.E., 2013. Inertia from an asymmetric Casiir effect. EPL, 101, 59001. https://arxiv.org/abs/1302.2775
Unzicker, A., 2015. Einstein's Lost Key. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Einsteins-Lost-Key-Overlooked-Century/dp/1519473435
Dicke, R., 1957. Gravitation without a principle of equivalence. Review of Modern Physics, 29, 363-376.
