I've suggested a new theory called quantised inertia (or MiHsC) that explains inertia as horizons damping quantum fields. It predicts galaxy rotation & lab thrusts without dark stuff or adjustment. My University webpage is here, I've written 4 books, see below right. Pls subscribe at patreon: here or support me at My Paypal
Showing posts with label dark energy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dark energy. Show all posts

Monday, 3 November 2014

The hidden crisis in physics

There are exciting times ahead in physics since new data is rocking old theories and opening up new possibilities, but you wouldn't think it for the horrified faces I've seen at conferences whenever I explain MiHsC. The crisis in physics we now have, downplayed by most, dwarfs the crisis in 1900 which was presaged by Lord Kelvin mentioning what he saw as two insignificant little details 'two clouds on the horizon'. These were the inability of the Michelson and Morley experiment to detect the invisible aether that people thought must exist for light to travel through, and the prediction that hot bodies must radiate infinite amounts at short wavelengths, the ultraviolet catastrophe. The first little cloud led to special relativity and the second to quantum mechanics. These were little experimental acorns that led to huge oak trees because people, typically curious outsiders, realised they were important and worked to bring theory into line.

In the present time we really are spoiled by our new ability to look into deep space, and instead of two modest clouds on the horizon we have something more resembling the childrens' bedroom in the film poltergeist (I saw that film on Halloween) with all the furniture flying around in a mad chaos.

Consider the galaxy rotation problem. Galaxies spin far too fast for general relativity to hold them together, so huge amounts of invisible (dark) matter must be added to them in a weird halo-like formation that has no explanation. There is no experimental evidence for dark matter, and for each different galaxy the dark matter has to be added by hand in such a way as to make general relativity work. This means dark matter is ad hoc and not predictive and so we may as well attribute the rotation to lingering poltergeists. In contrast, MiHsC predicts galaxy rotation without any 'fiddling'.

Now considering cosmic expansion: this is accelerating, an act that requires a tremendous input of energy from somewhere. The problem cannot be solved by a mathematical and linguistic trick, as it is done, by simple adding a term to the Einstein field equation and calling it dark energy. It must be fundamentally understood. MiHsC explains this acceleration in an intuitive and elegant manner by disallowing any pattern, including radiation, that does not fit exactly within the Hubble scale.

There is also a telling anomaly in the Cosmic Microwave Background, which looks too smooth on the largest scales in a way that agrees exactly with the suppression of large scale patterns by MiHsC.

If we enter more controversial territory, the fertile ground where observations that can't be made to fit current theory but have not yet been proven wrong are found: the Pioneer craft slowed down as they entered deep space in agreement with MiHsC (the thermal explanation now apparently 'accepted' relies on complex models with over 2000 finite elements, and fitting parameters). The flyby anomalies, odd dynamics of spacecraft passing Earth, are also predicted by MiHsC, as are the Podkletnov and Tajmar experiments, and the EmDrive anomaly found in the UK, China and at NASA.

I hope you can see that if you take all the evidence together, then at low accelerations (in deep space), or when you change the acceleration by spinning something (flybys, Podkletnov, Tajmar experiments) or you bring the Hubble horizon artificially closer to disallow more patterns (the EmDrive) standard physics fails, but MiHsC does not.

Wednesday, 15 May 2013

Cosmic acceleration: no need for dark energy.


The Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield recently made a brilliant musical video of David Bowie's Space Oddity on the International Space Station. The imagine of his guitar drifting lazily down the central spine of the station gave a nice demonstration of Newton's first law: the one that says that objects travel at constant velocity unless something pushes them. As I've discussed in a previous blog, MiHsC has a slightly different prediction, that nicely does away with the need for dark energy.

Imagine that one of Chris' fellow astronauts launches his guitar into deep space. According to MiHsC, as he launches it, its high acceleration relative to nearby matter means that the guitar sees Unruh radiation with a short wavelength, but as it moves into deep space, away from the gravity of the Sun, it's acceleration becomes tiny and the Unruh waves it sees become longer. Eventually, out beyond Pluto they lengthen to the Hubble scale (Theta), and when they exceed this scale they can never be observed. So following Mach (who said that what you cannot see in principle does not exist) the Unruh waves dissapear in a puff of logic (or an exchange between information and energy). This is also a bit like the notes on a guitar: there is a lowest note with a wavelength that is twice the length of the strings. So MiHsC predicts that in deep space the guitar's inertial mass fails. This makes it easier for the guitar to be accelerated again even by the gravity of the distant Sun, so it accelerates, the Unruh waves shorten, the guitar gets its inertia back, so its acceleration slows, it looses inertia .. and so on.

There is a competition here between the inertial failure caused by MiHsC's Hubble-scale Casimir effect and the inertia regained after the lower inertia causes renewed acceleration. MiHsC predicts that a balance exists between these two effects (and balances are the things that last) at a tiny acceleration of 2c^2/Theta = 6.7x10^-10 m/s^2. This acceleration is so small it would produce a speed change from zero to 60 miles per hour in 8500 years, or from zero to the speed of light in 13 billion years (the supposed age of the universe).. The point is that this minimum cosmic acceleration predicted by MiHsC is close to the recently observed cosmic acceleration, the one that is usually attributed ad hoc to dark energy. MiHsC predicts it far more elegantly from a simple philosophy (see the paper below for more details).

McCulloch, M.E., 2010. Minimum accelerations from quantised inertia. EPL, 90, 29001. Preprint: http://arxiv.org/abs/1004.3303

Thursday, 28 June 2012

Cosmic acceleration from MiHsC


Newton's first law, the inertial one, says that the default acceleration is zero, so, in a vacuum, objects move happily along at constant velocity until something external pushes on them.

MiHsC or quantised inertia (see the references below) predicts something slightly (usually undetectably) different: that the default acceleration is non-zero and equal to 2c^2/Theta where c is the speed of light and Theta is the Hubble scale, so 2c^2/Theta = 6.9*10^-10 m/s^2. This is tiny, but is equal to the recently-observed cosmic acceleration that some have attributed to 'dark energy', and model by grotesquely adding a cosmological constant term to Einstein's field equation. I'll try and explain here how MiHsC predicts the observed cosmic acceleration using just its two assumptions, which are:

1) Inertia is caused by Unruh radiation (a kind of wave) and..
2) ..these waves must fit exactly into the Hubble scale (like a Hubble-scale Casimir effect or cosmic seiche).

The thing about Unruh waves is that as an object's acceleration decreases the Unruh waves it sees get longer. With a boundary this becomes significant. If you make small waves in a bath with, say, an electric toothbrush, then most of the little waves will propagate, but if you make large waves with a paddle, then you'll have to get the wavelength exactly right or the waves won't fit. The point is that for longer wavelengths, a smaller proportion of the waves are allowed because of the boundary condition: this resonant behaviour is called a seiche in oceanography and happens a lot with waves in lakes and harbours. This implies straight away that Newton's first law (default acceleration = 0) won't quite work in MiHsC, because if the acceleration is zero, or close enough to zero, the Unruh waves are as large or larger than the observable universe, ie: unobservable, and as Mach said: if it can never be observed, forget it! (to paraphrase).

In MiHsC, the same process as in the bath works with objects moving into deep space. As they move away from other gravitating matter their acceleration drops. Therefore, the Unruh waves they see lengthen, and a greater proportion are disallowed, so that the inertia of the object eventually decreases very fast, making it easier to accelerate even with a distant gravitating mass, and this stabilises the acceleration at a minimum of 2c^2/Theta. Happily, this is the acceleration that has been seen in the deep cosmos. It has been attributed to the vague concept of dark energy, and modelled by adding the cosmological constant term (an adjustable parameter) to Einstein's field equations, but MiHsC predicts it far more easily, and without any adjustable parameters.

References:

McCulloch, M.E, 2010. Minimum accelerations from quantised inertia. EPL, 90, 29001. http://arxiv.org/abs/1004.3303
McCulloch, M.E., 2007. The Pioneer anomaly as modified inertia. MNRAS, 376, 338. http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0612599