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.
16 comments:
I enjoy your blog posts. The pysics is exciting, even if I no longer have the maths or physics knowledge needed to delve into it all.
Mike - following the maths and seeing where it points, even if the results seem unbelievable, is a great way forward. There are some odd anomalies around Casimir gaps and cavities. The problem may be in finding a method to manufacture the devices so they can be tested.
An interesting thing I found out is that momentum is not actually a conserved quantity. Since normally it is transferred between objects by relatively-constant fields (relative to the size of the objects) then in practice it is almost-always conserved, but when the force is transferred by a wave and the distances are of the order of half a wavelength, and the phases of the waves are correctly controlled, then the light-speed delay can produce a different direction force and momentum may not be conserved. This of course goes against what I've been taught, and for easily-achieved devices the (unbalanced) forces are calculated as being small, but there's a qualitative difference between something being too small to measure and being not there at all.
I hope that the various video-conferencing programs ensure that QI continues to make the impossible possible in this time of medical problems. Keep well!
Isn’t 91nm well within the capabilities of current technology?
Perhaps ask your blog and twitter followers if anyone has access to the technology to create cavorite cavity.
An excellent coronavirus activity!
91nm in 2d is trivial to do, but in 3D may not be possible yet
Congrats, keep going & stay safe!
The third paper reminds me of this patent
United States Patent 7,379,286 Haisch and Moddel
The basic patent idea is Casimir scale nano pores or nano layers force the orbitals of a gas to go to a lower state and when they return to a normal state energy is released. The source of this energy is supposedly the quantum vacuum. If it works....
http://ecee.colorado.edu/~moddel/QEL/Papers/US7379286.pdf
Summary:
"According to stochastic electrodynamics, the electronic orbitals in atoms are supported by the ambient zero-point (ZP) field. When the gas atoms are pumped into a Casimir cavity, where long-wavelength ZP field modes are excluded, the electrons spin down into lower energy orbitals and release energy in the process. This energy is collected in a local absorber."
Mike, I don't think you're thinking clearly about this. If passive antigravity were possible with a 91nm cavity, nature would have found a way to evolve such a thing long ago and we'd have, at the very least, a wide variety of wingless flying insects that outcompeted the others.
Dan, I think your statement "nature would have found a way" reflects a belief rather than hard science. There are many things nature hasn't done with evolution that are scientifically possible and what nature has come up with to counter gravity on earth is much simpler. Alternatively, if nature has used such a mechanism one might look for it in microscopic life such as bacteria or viruses rather than macroscopic life which woud include insects.
Mike, as always fascinating. Don't have the background or maths to follow in depth (Law degrees don't usually need it!) but follow your work as best I can with great interest.
Keep safe and well.
Mike there is a article called a skeptical Analysis of QI by Michelle. What is your response
It's Michele Renda, not Michelle.
RIP John Conway
Re: Dan and Robert's comments. I believe Robert is on the right track stating that microscopic life is more likely to evolve such a fitness boosting strategy. In that line of thinking for a particular morphology to evolve there must be selection pressure toward it and the least complicated (ie least energy intensive) method of boosting fitness wins. Microscopic organisms or viruses that require the ability to "fly" or at least maintain a state of being airborne - perhaps such as organisms that live in the upper atmosphere - may achieve this through simple physical processes such as exploiting thermals.
As such it may be unlikely there is selection pressure toward evolving Casimir nano-scale cavities in a particular shape that can exploit this "unworldly" physics.
Given all that I have been thinking about quantum vacuum energy extraction through nano-cavities, as in the paper I cited above, and wonder if Maxwell's demon may be a problem...
Mike.. here's a Quanta article that's lacking your input:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-is-the-universe-expanding-so-fast-20200427/
Mike, I've been unable to access your Twitter feed the last few days. What's up?
Tom: I haven't noticed a problem. Have I been shadow banned?
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