I've suggested (& published in 21 journal papers) a new theory called quantised inertia (or MiHsC) that assumes that inertia is caused by relativistic horizons damping quantum fields. It predicts galaxy rotation, cosmic acceleration & some observed lab thrusts without any dark stuff or adjustment. My Plymouth University webpage is here, I've written a book called Physics from the Edge and I'm on twitter as @memcculloch

Friday, 17 March 2023

A Quantised Inertia Drive is to be Launched to LEO by SpaceX

I’ve been in the ‘New Physics’ arena for 17 years now, and things keep getting weirder. When I started out in 2006, peer reviewers of my early papers were of the opinion that they didn’t exactly believe QI but it was more likely than dark matter, they could not find anything logically wrong and the theory agreed with the data, so that was that. In other words, they put logic and facts before mere opinion.

Today, an article appeared on Universe Today (see below from the Wayback Machine) reporting two factual events that I’ve had to keep quiet about for months due to an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement). The first is that a US company that I have been liaising with, called IVO Ltd, tested a QI thruster in a professional vacuum chamber and found it to agree with the QI theory. The quote from IVO CEO, Richard Mansell was “All Quantum Drives showed thrust consistent with predicted Quantized Inertial calculations. Control Drives confirmed that thrust measurements were not consistent with any other known forces.” The second piece of news was that they are to launch a QI drive on a SpaceX rocket on June 10th for a test in space. I was pleased that at last I could talk about these two pieces of news, but a few hours later the article had been deleted due to pressure apparently from ‘some physicists’ who doubted the QI theory. 


Who are these titans of physics who can erase facts that threaten their opinions within a few hours?! That would be like suppressing all news of the next SpaceX launch because you don’t believe in space: let them at least test the idea. Let’s hope this essay does not also magically disappear...

The article has of course been saved by the great Wayback Machine: Link

Kudos to Universe Today. They have republished the article with more balance. 'Tis here: Newlink

Friday, 10 February 2023

The Bullet Cluster May Prove QI

The Bullet cluster has been a poster child for the dark side for years. The cluster is shown below (Source: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss - Chandra X-Ray Observatory). The pink areas show the lit matter that can be seen through a telescope, ie: that actually exists. The idea is that the pink 'bullet' on the right has smashed through the pink 'target' on the left and is still moving rightwards.

Using the stars behind the cluster and distortions in them, it is possible to find out the amount of light bending (lensing) going on in the field of view and therefore, they assume, the invisible mass that is there. This is shown by the blue areas. This is their dark matter. For years they have been saying that the Bullet cluster proves the existence of dark matter because the dark is obviously separated from the visible.

However, it was very clear to me that this system is spinning. The bullet at least is spinning, as real bullets do, around the axis which is horizontal, and the blue areas look as if they are along that spin axis. This is a clear prediction of quantised inertia, see my flyby anomaly paper (ref 1) in which space probes speed up near to the Earth's spin axis. This is a schematic of the cluster:


I'd been mulling this over for years, but last year I asked a student to find some data on these clusters (masses and radii) and then I calculated where the acceleration would be as low as 2x10^-10 m/s^2, calculating on a grid and adding both the gravitational accelerations (GM/r^2) and mutual rotational acceleration (v^2/r). This QI-zone is present of course in all regions away from the cluster but is especially large in just the areas shown by blue in the famous diagram (see the blue in both diagrams above). The hypothesis is that along the spin axis mutual acceleration are very low and QI bends light there, mimicking the effect of matter.

They used to ask "Can MoND take a Bullet?" Well, MoND can't, but QI seems to do fine.

References

McCulloch, M.E., 2008. Modelling the flyby anomalies using a modification of inertia. MNRAS Letters, 389 (1), L57-60

Wednesday, 18 January 2023

A Solution for the Hubble Tension.

The sound of an object moving away from you will shift to a lower frequency as the waves from your point of view are spread out. This is the Doppler effect and applies to light waves as well. Edwin Hubble noticed that the light from distant galaxies was red shifted, that is, the wavelength of the light we received from them was longer, implying in a similar way that the galaxies were moving away and that the further ones were moving away faster. This was taken to mean that all the galaxies were moving away from a common centre as if there had been a Big Bang 13.6 billion years in the past. There are other ways to view it as well in QI, but let's stick with this image for simplicity for now.

Looking at local galaxies, the Hubble expansion rate has been measured to be 73 km/s/Mpc. That is, galaxies one megaparsec (Mpc) away from us are apparently moving away from us at 73 km/s. Recently, a new method was devised to predict the Hubble constant from observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background, that represents the cosmos at a redshift of Z=1000, and then extrapolate forward using standard models assuming dark matter and dark energy. Perhaps not surprisingly they predicted a slower cosmos: 67.7 km/s/Mpc. The difference between these values is now beyond a plausible level of chance, so it is a real problem (See Ref).

Now let us calculate what part of this predicted Hubble constant they would miss given that they do not include the extra acceleration due to quantised inertia. It would be 2x10-10 m/s2 over the lifetime of the universe (4.4x1017s) at the cosmic edge (radius = 4.4x1026m). OK. So what would it be at only 1Mpc distance (1Mpc = 3x1022m)?

dH = 2x10^-10 x 3x10^22 x 4.4x10^17 / 4.4x10^26 = 6 km/s/Mpc

The observed discrepancy in the Hubble constant is 5.3 km/s/Mpc. Nice!

For headaches and Hubble tension, just take QI!

References

Riess, A. et al., 2019. Large Magellanic Cloud Cepheid Standards Provide a 1% Foundation for the Determination of the Hubble Constant and Stronger Evidence for Physics beyond ΛCDM. The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 876, Issue 1, article id. 85, 13 pp.