Five Experiments

While I'm sat here in Devon, thinking, there are five intrepid groups actually doing experiments, so I thought I'd just briefly outline what they are doing. A lot of these experiments are reproducable so you could set up your own QI-test based on one of these, on my naive suggestion at the end (see the link), or better still - your own technique.

Madrid, University of Alcala.

This group was the first to be set up. In 2016, their leader, Prof Jose Luis Perez-Diaz came to stay in Plymouth for a year, funded by a Salvador de Madariaga grant, to liaise with me about possible QI experiments and we came up with a possible thruster design that involves a many-looped fibre-optic. Laser light cycles around it at high acceleration, and sees short Unruh waves that are damped asymmetrically either by the asymmetry of the loop itself or a metal shield on one side. A thrust should appear. For a 2W laser, QI predicted 1 microNewton of thrust. The loop was put on a pendulum and a thrust was seen of between 1-4 microN. This is on the order of 0.001 N/kW. It seems small but this is fuel-less propulsion, so it is a huge deal, allowing light rockets (both in the sense that they only use em radiation and are non-heavy) and interstellar travel. However, this Spanish result is inconclusive so far. The pendulum is subject to significant artefacts.

Dresden, TU-Dresden.

I have to be careful what I say about this one as Prof Tajmar does not wish me to give details. I persuaded Tajmar to take part in my DARPA-funded project in 2017. The idea was that if I could get even the famous 'Dr Zero' to say 'Hmm..' then the world would listen. He decided to investigate Travis Taylor's 2017 suggestion (link) that a mirrored cavity of light would produce thrust by QI, but Tajmar thought of a simpler way to do it: fire infra-red light into a 2-d copper cavity. He tried several symmetric & asymmetric cavities and immediately, as expected, the one that was asymmetric produced the amount of thrust predicted by QI (140nN from 0.35W). Later tests though have shown less thrust either because the copper is slowly oxidising and is less reflective, or because he's eliminated experimental artifacts. The observed (?) thrust/power was 0.0004 N/kW.

Poland

Zbigniew Komala from Poland contacted me on twitter wanting to do a test. At Plymouth my DARPA-funded postdoc (Jesus Lucio) and I have developed a model that predicts which cavity shapes give the best thrust and we found that a Bart-cavity is pretty good (in the shape of Bart Simpson's head). So I asked Zbigniew to be the first to try that cavity. I am amazed by his work ethic, ingenuity and ability to manufacture cavities. He suspends his cavities on a spring and measures movements using a laser interferometer. He has found that the Bart drive does produce thrust of the expected size (30 microN from 20W). This is 0.00175 N/kW. The best thrust so far! Go Poland!

California, PD, USC.

I met Dr Ryan Weed (CEO of Positron Dynamics) at an Interstellar Studies meeting in the UK, last year when we were still allowed to meet with people. He suggested we work together. With Prof David Barnhart at the University of Southern California he put together a couple of fantastic bids for QI funding. One of which we won from CATIE (the California Aerospace Technology Institute for Excellence). The other is pending. The Californian team, delayed by covid-19, is now setting up the experiments. They aim to try the laser-into-a-cavity trick, but on a levitating track and in a vacuum.

Atlanta

Jamie Ciomperlik (aka monomorphic) is the latest explorer to have a go. He progressed remarkably quickly, going from "Hello" to "Here's the first result" in a couple of weeks. He's firing a laser into a 2-d cavity made of mirrors (see here) and using a torsion balance to detect thrust. He saw something that looked like thrust but at the moment it looks to be thermal. The trouble with his setup is that our Plymouth cavity model cannot predict what he should see since I do not know what his Q value is (it does not model glass yet) or how much of the light will escape from the 2-d open cavity.

All these teams have contributed something great. The Spanish team were the first QI experimenters. They showed interest before anyone else. The German team are very careful. They saw a thrust which impressed DARPA no end, and got me through to phase II of the project, but we shall see. The Polish team (Z. Komala) has done a brilliant job with the Bart drive and shows a lot of initiative, testing various other possibilities. I have great hope for the Californian and Atlantan teams, who have a tremendous American can-do attitude and great equipment.

Quantised inertia definitely works on galaxies and wide binaries. I believe it works on Earth as well and will produce thrust and energy that will revolutionise our society. This is testable, and every physics department should be testing it, instead they are rebuffing my attempts to talk to them because apparently I "make them feel uncomfortable". A shame, but I guess this is par for the course. All the more respect then to the engineering-oriented groups mentioned above who are testing QI and in three cases are being funded significant amounts to do so. Physicists please join in! One other suggested test is here. What you lose is dark matter for which there is no evidence after 40 years of hyper-expensive searching. What you gain is a stake in a new revolution that has brilliant astronomical evidence going for it (link), and maybe you'll get some funding too.