A Potted History of QI

2001. Trigger moment. Perhaps this is the point at which it all began. I was working at the Met Office. After the angst of post-docs, a secure ocean modelling research job meant I was able to branch out a little. On 6th February for various reasons I had to hide in the library and there I read about a paper of Haisch, Ruella and Puthoff in New Scientist, wherein they attributed inertia to the zero point field (zpf). I loved the approach. Later I realised it was wrong since they have to hard-wire an arbitrary cutoff to get rid of a background zpf, so I developed Quantised Inertia instead which relies on zpf gradients so is not affected by absolute values. This is my method: to not allow anything arbitrary into a theory.

2006. Pioneer. The first paper on Quantised Inertia. I showed that if you assume that inertia is due to Rindler horizons damping Unruh radiation (an excited quantum background / zpf) then this predicted the Pioneer anomaly, the cosmic mass and various other observed oddities.

2012. Galaxies. For a long time I was unable to work out how to apply QI to galaxies, they are more complex than lone spacecraft, but I worked out how to do it in this paper and showed dark matter is emphatically not needed. I did it in more detail in a paper in 2017.

2013. The mechanism. I proposed for the first time a beautiful and direct mechanism for the inertial mass we all know and love. When an object accelerates in one direction, is sees a relativistic horizon in the other direction. This horizon damps the quantum background creating a quantum gradient that pushes back on the object giving it inertia. i.e. inertia is not intrinsic to the object but due to external quantum forces. You might say this is ‘mass without mass’. I also mentioned how to make objects move without propellant: by making artificial horizons (bits of metal).

2014. Textbook1. My first textbook on QI was called Physics from the Edge: full of anecdotes, equations and a few cartoons. It was published by World Scientific, but was not the mass market breakthrough I needed because it was priced as a monograph and too expensive.

2015. I had a go at predicting the apparent thrust of Shawyer’s emdrive and QI seemed to predict it very well, especially the effect of adding dielectrics to the cavity. I took this as evidence that my musings on propellant-less thrust in 2013 were not idle.

2017. DARPA said they ‘had been watching me for some time’, and came to visit. I was given $1.3M to test for thrust in the lab. My papers on the emdrive and dielectrics reminded a smart engineer called Frank Becker of some anomalous capacitor tests he once did and he teamed up with Ankur Bhatt to do some tests. In liaison with me they found thrust and then so did other labs including one I set up at Plymouth with a great engineer called Richard Arundal (fun times!).

2019. My Spanish post-doc Jesus Lucio and I published a paper showing that only QI can explain the orbits of wide binary stars. I loved working with Jesus (as I did with Richard).

2020. Unruh Radiation is Real. Michael Lynch and his team made the first observation of Unruh radiation in positrons decelerating in crystals at CERN, and kindly emailed me in some excitement to tell me. This was good news since I’ve been depending on the existence of Unruh radiation for 14 years – it’s essential to QI.

2023. Space Test. A forward thinking company called IVO Ltd and led by Richard Mansell (a thoroughly decent guy you can’t help but admire) tested a Becker and Bhatt style capacitor in a professional vacuum chamber and saw QI thrust. They then launched a test into space! Unfortunately, the cubesat was lost before the test could be made but they’ll try again in 2025.

2024. Textbook 2. This year I've shown that only QI can explain the orbit of Proxima Centauri, our nearest neighbour in space, which orbits Alpha and Beta Centauri far too fast. I also completed my second textbook, published by the great Robert Zubrin, who is himself a force of nature. I made sure this one was a lot cheaper than the first and it is selling well. In it, I point out 54 anomalies that old physics cannot explain, introduce QI, and show how it predicts these anomalies. I also propose how it could produce new clean energy sources and how it not only explains the orbit of Proxima but how QI thrust could get us there in 10-15 years.

It's been a great adventure, but the best is yet to come...