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

Sunday 6 June 2021

Whose Hand on the Tiller?

Here is a Letter I just emailed to New Scientist. I doubt they will publish it so I am putting it here to avoid having wasted my time:

In 2007, I started to publish peer reviewed papers suggesting a new theory called quantised inertia which predicts disc galaxy rotations without dark matter, simply and without adjustment. I've published 25 peer-reviewed papers on it and I am now funded to test its predictions of propellantless thrust, but I have had difficulty getting the message out. The arXiv publishes preprints of papers before they appear in journals, but its anonymous editors have refused to publish some of my papers even after they were published in good journals. Those it did accept, it hid away in a section called 'general physics' which is a sort of naughty boys' room that few people look at. Anonymous people also wreak havoc on wikipedia & google. When you search for quantised inertia, you find excoriation, whereas in reality there is far more evidence for quantised inertia than for dark matter - though admittedly that is not difficult since dark matter has no evidence at all. Scientists use these public sources for their convenience and make decisions based on them so it is not right that anonymous people, who could be unqualified, or with a conflict or interest, are having such an impact on research that has been through rigorous peer review. We have to reinstate the scientific method or we may be manipulated into making the wrong decisions.

10 comments:

Keani said...

There are some anomalyes in how stars behave near our galaxy supermassive black hole, that again dark matter seems to explain away.

Looking forward to see dark matter become a matter of the past.

Mark In Mayenne said...

I have been surprised by the silence around your work

George Soli said...

Hi Mike.. After talking to presenters at the APS April meeting I was pleased to discover that ResearchGate was a very appreciated alternative to the arXiv. George

Simon Derricutt said...

Mike - yep, the general silence that rings out over QI surprises me too. I've added publicity where I can, but even Frank Becker and Ankur Bhatt's "capacitor" experiment hasn't seemed to generate a positive response.

Possibly the reason for this is that the implications of the theory are that Newton's laws of gravity and motion are wrong, and that Einstein's view of how the universe works is also a bit wrong. Neither momentum nor energy are always conserved, and FTL travel and transmission may be possible. It's a lot of change to some fundamental things we thought were true.

Still, new ways of seeing things have always taken some time to be accepted. Einstein himself had a lot of opposition, and QI is almost as drastic a change to the fundamentals of physics. Luckily there are enough people using QI to design experiments that we should see some undeniable results reasonably soon, so maybe that will lead to more acceptance.

There will be fierce resistance on Wikipedia and social media, and in mainstream science, simply because people who have spent a while learning the old ideas want to defend them. It's always been so, but the ability to attack people whilst remaining anonymous (afforded by the internet) makes it a lot easier. Still, it also makes it easier to reach people who will actually consider the ideas and work on them, and the people you want to reach are those who won't be swayed by social media but instead look at the data rather than beliefs.

For a few years after the Wright brothers first flew, the newspapers were still calling it a lie and prominent scientists of the time called it impossible. It's what happens. Maybe this doesn't make it nicer for you, but it may make it more understandable.

Robert said...

Mike,

I see this kind of response over and over. Scientists consider themselves unbiased but the reality is they are sometimes the worst. Just keep at it and perhaps do your own experiments. Don't let them get you down.

Philosopher Rex said...

Bravo! Just keep working and moving forward Mike. The detractors & haters are simply sycophants who follow & support the big ego's - this is true in any & all fields, not just physics. You are not alone!

The truth shall win out.

Ireland as seen from America said...

There is considerable rot in the scientific community. Politics have taken over. It's part of the general decay of reason in the Western World.

Unknown said...

It's me Piotr, I have no account here, therefore I post anonymously. The treatment by scientific journals is in fact unfair. Quantized Inertia may be speculative, but so is the existence of an invisible dark matter.
But I have a totaly different question to you. Critics of propellantless drives argue that they violate conservation of energy and momentum. In Special Relativity energy and momentum are unified as energy-momentum. Quantized Inertia takes a lot of inspiration from modern theories which try to incorporate the role of information into Special Relativity because due to the Landauer Principle information and energy-momentum are equivalent and the existence of Rindler-Horizon's makes it necessary to take information into account for a more complete understanding of Special Relativity.
I would like to ask you, Mike, if you considered the possibility that the apparent local violation of energy-momentum conservation could be resolved by a global energy-momentum conservation due to effects somewhat similar to Mach's Principle? Proponents of propellantless drives based on the assumption of Mach Effects argue that they use the distant stars and galaxies as reaction mass and that this ensures global energy-momentum conservation.
I think that in Quantized Inertia something similar happens. A stationary object is visible in very distant regions of the universe when it is barely on the edge of the cosmic horizon there. If this object now accelerates without any exhaust into the opposite direction then it disappears behind the cosmic horizon of the regions where it was visible before. Therefore information was destroyed there which is equivalent to a loss of energy-momentum there. Could it therefore be that the gain of energy-momentum of the accelerating object is exactly balanced out by the loss of the same amount of energy-momentum in distant regions of the universe?
In the case of a conventional propulsion with exhaust this does not happen because the disappearence of the object behind the cosmic horizon is balanced by the exhaust which flies into the opposite direction.
This is a very crude idea, more like an educated guess. But maybe if you do the math thoroughly it may turn out that the global energy-momentum / information budget is perfectly balanced.

Derek said...

Yes, as I understand it that is how the conservation of energy and momentum is maintained. Note that Quantised Inertia was originally known as Modified Inertia from a Hubble Scale Casimir effect. Meaning that, just as the Casimir force on one Casimir plate is balanced by the Casimir force on the other, so the inertial "force" on a local object was balanced by an opposite force on the object's Hubble horizon (or its acceleration horizon when accelerating.

Bryan Payne said...

Thank you, Dr. McCulloch.