Prof Martin Tajmar recently told me that being confined to the home, probably doesn't make a difference to me because I'm a theorist. He's right - I've been largely home-working for years, but the coronavirus is now holding up his experiments, the experiments of the Spanish team, and also I can't meet with my post-doc Jesus for discussions.
However, the global shutdown is an ideal opportunity to think, and also to appeal to other theorists while they are perhaps less affected by peer pressure. So my aim over the next few weeks is to combine various bits of theory I already have to finish an informational version of quantised inertia: one which predicts inertial mass and thrust as before, but also gravity, including the value of G, & I'd like to have a stab at particle masses too. As part of that I have submitted several papers.
In the first of these papers I derive quantised inertia from the destruction of information that occurs as objects accelerate and their information horizons shrink. QI drops out this in seven lines of maths! This is a boost for John Wheeler's It from Bit idea, because, if quantised inertia can be derived from information theory, then that means that galaxy rotation, hence most of the cosmos, can be also, without any silly dark matter. I submitted this paper to Astrophysics and Space Science (and I heard today it has been provisionally accepted! - subject to minor modification).
The second paper, submitted to Acta Astronautica, is a collaboration with my post-doc Dr Jesus Lucio. We outline the numerical QI cavity model that he coded, and the optimised cavities it predicts. We were going to include a footnote on the encouraging results from Tajmar, but that has been vetoed. The model predicts that firing a laser or LED light into a particularly-shaped metal cavity beats industry-standard ion drives without even needing fuel, so this is a paper that could be game changing for the satellite industry.
The third paper, that I have just submitted to Entropy, is even more radical and shows that if you take an asymmetric cavity, as above, and shrink it down to 91 nm or so, then you don't even need to fire a laser into it. The energy from the quantum vacuum produces thrust by itself. Here, I am simply allowing the maths to take me to a completely mad place that implies the future construction of floating bricks and buildings - of the kind I like to make when I play Minecraft with my son. The derivation may be bold but it is simple and logical, so why not? When the world starts up again, it might well be starting up with a stronger & more useful version of physics.
