So what have I been doing over the past few weeks apart from not updating this blog because I've been trying to decide what I can reveal now that I'm working with experimenters? A lot has happened, so here's a summary of some of it:
I attended the FISW workshop on interstellar travel, in the UK, and gave a talk showing how the propellant-less propulsion you can get from quantised inertia will do three things: 1) make it easier to get into space, 2) make it easier to accelerate towards the speed of light because no heavy fuel needs to be carried and 3) QI may even allow us to outpace light.. My talk, or rather half of it given that the camera was pointing at me and not the slides, can be found here and a paper on it here.
My postdoc and I published a paper on wide binaries. These co-orbiting stars are a little like mini-galaxy rotation problems in that when they are far from each other, they orbit at a speed that should send them zooming off to infinity. Strangely, just like galaxies, they remain bound. The crucial point is that dark matter can't be put in between them to hold them together because that must stay spread out smoothly or the mainstream would be unable to model full galaxies. It turns out that MoND can't model wide binaries either. The point is that only QI can model wide binaries. Experimentum crucis!?
Jaume Gine and I published a paper on an alternative derivation of quantised inertia from the uncertainty principle. I've done a similar derivation before in a paper, and the result was close to QI, but Jaume found that if we assume that the important parameter is not the distance to the horizon, but the width of the horizon, then the result comes out exactly.
I've also had two meetings with DARPA and those seemed to go well, so funding may be OK for awhile (touch wood). Regarding the experiments being done, I cannot tell you any details (because the experimenters have asked me not to), but I can summarise the experimental results so far as not conclusive, but I'm extremely encouraged by them. More conclusive tests will occur in November. It is possible that a couple more groups in the US will collaborate on QI experiments: one on extreme spin and one looking at asymmetric capacitors.
I've been playing around with ideas to develop a full QI cosmology, and reading books by A. Unzicker (Einstein's Lost Key) which discusses the variable speed of light version of GR, which predicts as well as the geometric one, another by Halton Arp (Seeing Red) which talks about intrinsic redshift, and papers by F.W. Kantor who had a model of the cosmos where physics was determined by how much of the cosmos an object could have seen in its lifetime. After a lot of scribbling on paper and getting to the same point where mass seems to equal area, a rough outline has been coalescing. If the cosmic redshift is not caused by recession of the stars from us but by something intrinsic (as suggested by Arp) then this fits better with quantised inertia which ties inertial mass to cosmic age. QI predicts that the inertial mass was lower in the past because objects had not yet had time to see very far off (remember Kantor?) so everybody' cosmos was smaller (although the cosmos itself was not). Therefore, transitioning electrons in atoms in the past likely emitted redshifted (less energetic) photons. So when we look at far stars we see a redshift. QI may also explain some peculiar high redshifts seen by Arp near to galactic axes (new matter?) and redshift quantisation..? For more details of this see my earlier comments here.
All in all, a nice mix of progress in theory, in experiment and in learning to collaborate.
All in all, a nice mix of progress in theory, in experiment and in learning to collaborate.
Maths, science, history, unraveling a mystery that all started with the Big Bang. Maybe.
(suggested amended to the Big Bang Theory's TV theme)
