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

Wednesday 18 September 2019

FTL, Wide Binaries, Uncertainty, Data & Arp.

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.

Maths, science, history, unraveling a mystery that all started with the Big Bang. Maybe.
(suggested amended to the Big Bang Theory's TV theme)

12 comments:

Mark In Mayenne said...

All starting to come together?

Honeyradiance said...

Hi,

I saw your brief discussion of MiHsC on Tedx on Youtube and I have a hypothetical question and/or problems. In your discussion, towards the end, you describe the possibility that inertia may be nullified or canceled by a hypothetical device. You said: "It's not quite known how to dampen quantum waves yet, but conductive materials seem to do the trick."

Interestingly, I wrote a science fiction novel (not yet published) in the late 1990's that uses this very concept, and it was inspired by science articles I had read at the time by Bernard Haisch and Rueda who were saying that Inertia was caused by the Zero Point Field waves and if you could somehow shield from that, you could accelerate a spacecraft up to close to the speed of light. So my spacecraft in my novel used this concept: Inertial Dampening by Zero Point Field Cancellation.

But then recently I ran into a problem with this. When thinking about, say a bullet; supposing I could build a gun that used an inertial dampening device to accelerate a bullet up to relativistic velocities with very little energy input. Then suppose the bullet left the barrel of the hypothesized gun (which has this inertial dampening device inside it), travels a certain distance, and then hits the surface of the moon, releasing a tremendous amount of energy, equivalent to a nuclear bomb. I asked: "Where is all this energy coming from?" I had not put it into the system. So I ask you: Is the energy collected Unruh waves? Is it energy that has, in reality, been extracted from the Zero Point Field? Is it akin to putting a block of stone onto wheels and rolling it downhill? (As opposed to pushing the block down a steady incline without wheels, which would take quite a lot of exertion due to friction.)

To close, I believe that Inertia CAN be canceled or dampened, because evidence seems to indicate that it has already been going on in our skies, as the many UFO reports illustrate. I have a friend who was in Iraq in the navy and he told me he saw a blip come up on his radar screen on ship that was traveling at incredible velocities, then turned on a dime. Such accelerations, he told me, would be impossible because the G forces would kill anyone or destroy equipment immediately. I know this is merely anecdotal evidence, but, if true, somebody IS modifying and/or cancelling inertia. But how do we rationalize this extra kinetic energy?

Mike McCulloch said...

Honeyradiance: Good question. The extra energy needed for QI comes from the destruction of information caused by the formation of horizons (see Landauer's principle).

VAXHeadroom said...

I mentioned Harold Aspden's work to you before, but the quantized red-shift you mention in your last paragraph is something he derives specifically, calculating that the energy levels in which electrons exist must be quantized in only 1 of 5 domains. What we observe on Earth is in the 2nd to highest, meaning 1/5 of galactic redshifts should be nearly zero, one domain is higher than ours, so 1/5 is blue-shifted, and 3/5 (60%) will be red-shifted. I did a cursory investigation into this a while back and looking at a galactic catalog showed the red-shifts banded as he suggested.
-- Emory Stagmer @VAXHeadroom

Honeyradiance said...

Thank you for your reply. I will look into Landauer's Principle. Much appreciated and heartfelt. :)

Honeyradiance said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mumrah said...

Not a scientist but... I know you've previously been interested in the flyby anomaly. I wondered whether the anomalous acceleration of Oumuamua could be due to its solar flyby. Now we have C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) incoming will we see another anomaly? Can it be predicted?

jacob said...

Intrinsic redshift? I thought redshift within rotating galaxies was the (only) measure of their rotation? that would rule out "age" as parameter to some degree, wouldn't it?

Richard Mansell said...

I've been looking forward to your next blog post. Thank you! Although I understand the experimenters wanting to keep the experiments quiet, I guess we'll have to be patient for those results to come out.

That being said, thank you for the information and links that you shared in this post. It has given me more direction in what information to digest next. Keep up the good work! Since we deal with symmetrical and asymmetrical capacitors in our lab, I cannot wait to try some of our own experiments in the area.

Looking forward to the your next post.

retrocycler said...

I just read about a super wide binary pair of brown dwarfs in Ophiuchus - CFHTWIR-Oph 98 - that might make another poster child for QI:



"With extremely
low masses and a very large separation,
Oph 98 has the weakest binding energy
of any binary system known to date."

retrocycler said...

I'm posting a second time, because I forgot to set the follow-up comment tracker/email thingy. Please, then reply to this particular post:

I just read about a super wide binary pair of brown dwarfs in Ophiuchus - CFHTWIR-Oph 98 - that might make another poster child for QI:



"With extremely
low masses and a very large separation,
Oph 98 has the weakest binding energy
of any binary system known to date."

Mike McCulloch said...

Retrocycler: Thank you for that. I have tweeted it. Unfortunately they do not give the orbital speed in the paper..