Light is a Quantum Pressure Wave?

 I've been writing a new book, made up so far of mini-papers, but I've been sticking them all together and two of the bits taken together are pretty exciting so I'm writing a paper on that. The paper has four steps to it:

Step 1. Thesis. I've shown that light looks like a sound wave in the quantum background. When you assume that, it predicts a speed that agrees with the speed of light within 10%, which is the uncertainty of some of the parameters I'm using anyway. So that was my initial observational test and it passed.

Step 2. Based GR. If you apply quantised inertia to this, you get the equation for the propagation of light from general relativity. It predicts general relativistic effects not from curved spacetime, but from the inhomogeneity of the quantum background around matter. This is a much more scientific model than curved space because you can see both the effect (light bending) and in principle also the cause of it (inhomogeneities in the quantum background).

Step 3. A Test. This model predicts that if you fire a laser through a cavity then the light should slow down. That is a test that can be done quite easily and as I recall was done by Harold White once. He fired a laser through an emdrive just for the heck of it and saw anomalous results.

Step 4. Application. What this means is that by engineering the vacuum (not sure how yet) we should be able to increase the speed of light and travel faster than the usual light speed limit. Perhaps this already happens in some parts of deep space?

If I can get this past the reviewers or censors this will be a great paper. It represents conceptual progress, but is also testable and applicable. If I can't publish it that way, I'll just go to Plan B and continue with the book. It was supposed to be about time, but that's a concept so big to think about, that a lot of other things are dropping out along the way.

A Tale of Two Satellites

In March 2025 SpaceX launched a Rogue Space Systems cubesat with an IVO Ltd Quantum (QI) Drive on it. Up till Christmas I was monitoring its trajectory, almost every day and it did seem to push up by about a few metres when it seemed from personal communications that they had turned it on, but analyses like this are very subjective.

Unfortunately, as you may know, there was a engineering glitch so the thruster could not be turned on for more than a minute before problems arose, so the hoped-for orbit raise of kilometers did not come to pass. Which leaves us in a less than ideal position. Can we see if there is QI thrust? We probably cannot do this for certain, but I collected a lot of data from SatNOGS DB (nearly every day for several months) so it makes sense to see what we can get from it.

They always say "Don't compare yourself with others," but in science that is a valid method. One thing we can do is to use a control: a similar satellite without a QI drive. The IVO Sat (Norad ID = 63235) had a close twin brother (Norad ID = 63220) which was the same shape and mass and was launched by the same Falcon 9 rocket into about the same orbit. So, we can look at their fall over the last three months and see if the IVO Sat fell less than the control satellite. IVOsat fell from 506.3 km on 30/9/25 to 501.42 km on 30/12/25, a fall of 4880 metres. The other satellite fell from 504.98 km to 499.5 km so a fall of 5480 metres. Therefore the IVOsat fell 600 metres less over three months. Does that mean the QI Drive thrust it up by 600 meters over that time? Possibly. Is that the rise we expect give the thrusting they did?

The thrust generated by the QI quantum drive was expected to be 1.75 mN and the mass of the satellite is 20 kg which means that the along track acceleration (a) will be

a = F/mass = 0.00175/20 = 8.75x10^-5 m/s^2

Since I happen to know that the typical burn time was about a minute, and if we assume it was fired once every other day, a reasonable guess, then the change in speed per day (dv) is

dv = 8.75x10^-5 x 60 /2 = 0.002625 m/s

The change in height (dH) is

dH = 2.dv.sqrt(r^3/GM) = 5 metres per day

The observed rise (compared to its twin) was 600 metres in 90 days, which is 6.6 metres per day. Therefore the IVOsat moved up relative to its twin satellite by about the height you might expect if the Quantum Drive was being fired every other day for one minute on average. It looks plausible, but it could be that the drive was generating a Lorentz force and pushing off the Earth's magnetic field. My calculation of the Lorentz force suggests it's too small but I do not have detailed knowledge of the circuitry in the drive. We had hoped to have thrust large enough to avoid ambiguities like this but that has not been the case.

If this QI Quantum Drive was indeed thrusting then it means a radical change to the entire satellite industry because we can now have onboard thrusters that are silent and do not need to carry heavy fuel so they will last much longer, but we are not in a position to say that yet. Anyway, a big thank you to IVO Ltd, Rogue Space Systems and SpaceX who got the test up there (an amazing feat in itself) and have produced some results. I hope they will soon make a more detailed press release on it.