The 18th Birthday of Quantised Inertia

Recently, last Thursday, it was the 18^th Birthday of Quantised Inertia. Back then, in 2006 I was a humble ocean and wave modeller at the UK Met Office in Exeter, with a hobby of thinking about physics in the evenings. It was on the 1^st February, 2006 that I first realised that Newton’s First Law was slightly wrong (ie: QI) and that this was a big step

I gave my first talk on QI (then I called it MiHsC) later that year at the Alternative Gravities Conference at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh where I had the last talk, and I nearly did not get to speak as they all wanted to go to the pub! In 2007 I published the first paper on QI. One of my colleagues at the Met Office told me I shouldn’t have such grandiose dreams, weathermen should stay below Karman Line. I submitted anyway and my first paper on QI was accepted by MNRAS (a prestigious astronomical journal). The reviewer was delightfully amused that I’d used the term ‘forecast’ instead of ‘predict’ and did not quite believe QI, he said, but he also said it was better than the alternatives he'd seen already published, so why not publish?

By 2008, I’d published enough papers to leave the Met Office and get into academia at Plymouth University, lecturing in geomatics (the maths of positioning in space) which was a subject vague enough to fit. I enjoyed the teaching, and my courses on GPS Positioning stimulated me to develop a better way to formulate QI, using uncertainty in position and information. I finally managed to show that QI predicts galaxy rotation without dark matter which is a massive result, and very clear in that even the onset of the anomaly is predicted well, and I was invited by World Scientific to publish a monograph.

In some papers I mentioned producing thrust from QI, and a few years later DARPA got in touch (2016), said they'd been "following my work for some time", and invited me to apply for funds. I applied and won $1.3M to test for what I’d predicted: thrust from highly accelerated objects in cavities. We first tried photon cavities. I used labs in Germany and Spain, which I was soon unable to visit due to covid, but the photons were too light (pun intended) to work. Fortunately along came engineers Becker and Bhatt who'd read my papers and they suggested electron cavities instead (capacitors). That seemed to work in their lab and IVO Ltd (Richard Mansell) confirmed and improved on it. I managed to get DARPA funds to Plymouth to replicate it with engineer Richard Arundal (a paper is in review) and now IVO have launched a test into space via SpaceX and Rogue Space Systems! Another recent development is that Lynch et al. (2021) have finally confirmed Unruh radiation using CERN data. Morgan Lynch emailed me excitedly to tell me. This is good for QI, which has been assuming its existence for 18 years!

Now I am temporarily between jobs, busy with new QI books (one sci-fi and one text book) and papers, but given the crazy acceleration of the past few years, there is some relief in pausing to decide how best to progress. QI (my hobby) is so big now: a radical change to physics, thrust, clean energy, interstellar travel... It needs development for the sake of getting humanity to the next level, yes, but to avoid burn out I do need to get back to the feeling that this is a deep scientific exploration & not just the race of all time.

Keep Calm and Quantise Inertia!