Breakfast at the 100 Year Starship

I went to the 100 Year Starship Symposium in Orlando, Florida, last year and presented some of my work on "Quantised Inertia and FTL". After my talk, this chap, a fellow presenter, Jack Sarfatti, stood up and said: "I'm very excited by your work, and it might even be true! However, what you need to ask is WHEN is your event horizon" (ie: the boundary I use for the Hubble-scale Casimir effect).

The next morning at breakfast a friendly chap from New York came and sat with me and said, in the nicest way possible, that my talk had reminded him why he'd left physics for the law. Anyway, I went to get my scrabbled eggs, plus watermelon on the side, and I saw Jack Sarfatti sitting alone at a table and said "Hello". He exploded out of his seat, and joined me and the lawyer. He quickly explained the holographic principle, how it explains why entropy increases, and again why he thinks I need to ask the question: "WHEN is my event horizon?". After 10 minutes of intensity my excluded lawyer friend stood up to go, and said to me: "It was nice meeting you" and then said to Jack: "Well, I didn't meet you, but it was very educational!". Jack didn't seem to notice this and carried on. I liked Jack immediately. Reading about him later, it seems he's dabbled into just about everything, but that's fine by me: to get good ideas you need lots of different ones, some crazy, so long as you do then test them properly. I do think it would be hard, in a conversation, to get him to listen for any length of time though.

I appreciated Jack's comment about causality. I have wondered for over 20 years how to make time flexible. I tried to write a paper (my first) back in 1992 suggesting a theory of fuzzy time, and someone from the physics department I'd just graduated from said: "Too woolly, you need to suggest a test, and also it sounds like Cramer". I learned then that John Cramer had suggested a transactional (noncausal) interpretation of quantum mechanics. Bizzarely, 20 years later it was him chairing our exotic session at the 100 Year Starship Symposium. Anyway, after over 20 years in physics I have learned to look for tests, so, for causality, where's the data to show the way?

Well, John Cramer is setting up a test for retrocausality, see: http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/

An analogy for MiHsC

The following is one of my attempts at a rough analogy for MiHsC. Imagine an ant who has somehow strayed onto a drum. Everytime the poor ant tries to move, he makes waves on the drumskin that bounce him and slow him down (a sort of inertia). Now, only waves of certain wavelengths can exist on drumskins (and in harbours too) those with nodes (non moving parts) at the solid boundary or edge. The allowed waves are: ones with a wavelength twice the drum's diameter, the same size as the diameter, 2/3 times the diameter, 1/2 the diameter and so on.. If the ant knew this then maybe he could move in such a way that the waves he excites are too long, or the wrong wavelength, to fit onto the drumskin (are disallowed), then he could move without being bounced around (less inertial mass), and get back home quicker.

There's a saying: "More haste, less speed". In this case maybe "Less haste, more speed" would be more apt. MiHsC is similar, but replace the ant with any object, the drumskin waves with Unruh waves and the drumskin with the Hubble volume. To lose inertial mass, accelerate more slowly. The cosmos is a drum? - Feynman would have been chuffed.

At the NAM in Manchester

Last Thursday I attended one day of the UK-Germany National Astronomy Meeting in Manchester and I gave a talk in the (unofficial) Cosmology 4 'Dark Energy, Dark Matter and Modified Gravity' session on my recent work 'Testing quantised inertia with wide binaries'. I was asked a few interesting questions. Someone asked me whether I'd applied MiHsC/QI to the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). I have done some work on this: I can model the apparent supression of power at the largest scales using the Hubble-scale Casimir effect, but haven't taken account of curved space yet, and further: that CMB anomaly does not poke outside the error bars yet.

One chap suggested that I could look at photons since they traverse areas of low acceleration. OK, but looking for a more direct test, I am now trying to focus on either very simple astronomical tests (wide binaries) or terrestrial experiments (lab tests). He also said that I should not cite the Pioneer anomaly as a successful test any more because Turyshev et al. have modelled the Pioneer anomaly as a mundane thermal radiative reaction force: heat emitted from the RTGs bounces off and pushes the craft. However, although I haven't yet read their paper in detail, it seems they have used a complex reflection model with many adjustable parameters (tricky) and also I would have expected there to be a significant decay in the Pioneer anomaly if radiation was the cause since the RTGs should have significantly cooled over the 30 years of data, but Anderson et al. saw no decay in the anomaly. Turyshev et al. claim there is a decay. I need to look at the data to decide this.

Anyway, someone then asked 'Can you tell me anything that would convince me that inertia is caused by Unruh radiation'. That nonplussed me because I'd just presented all my comparisons of MiHsC/QI with the data and the agreement with data is what convinces me. Anyway, I answered: 'My main reason is that it works'. By this I mean that if you do assume that inertia comes from Unruh radiation, and the Hubble-scale Casimir effect which follows, then you get successful experimental predictions that are unobtainable from other theories. I do not yet have a specific physical model for exactly how the Unruh radiation might interact with objects and cause inertia (I think this is what this person wanted, but for me that has to come later, and slowly). I have a few ideas about possible mechanisms, but no experiments to discriminate between them yet.

Sheldon's nightmare scenario.

Speaking of inertia: it affects subjects too. I'm sure it would horrify the character of Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory, but most of standard physics has been developed over the past three hundred years by people familiar mostly with the working of human-made machines. The implication is that theory reflects technology. This has led to a physics that predicts simple things well in the short term, but restricts us to the view that the machine-universe is running down to its inevitable heat death. I like to think instead that the universe is growing, in a way more akin to organisms or the www, and that now we are starting to understand biology and computing, which require us to use the idea of information, physics will have to be overhauled to take this view. Of course, this may be all new-age hot air, unless an experiment can be suggested that can discriminate between this new 'informatics' and the old physics.

I have lots of fun imagining Sheldon & Wolowitz from the Big Bang Theory (modern versions of Plato and Aristotle) discussing this idea. For example, how's this?:

Wolo: So...Sheldon. How about this idea that theoretical physicists get their paradigms from engineers?
Shel: Hokum, and I have some empirical data to disprove it.
Wolo: OK, bring it on!
Shel: Do I ever listen to you?
Wolo: Granted, but you can't base your argument on one data point.
Shel: Howard, I'm a theoretical physicist. I don't even need one data point!
Wolo: This is nonsense. Even you can't ignore objective reality!
Shel: Alright (sigh), if you insist on dragging mundane reality into it, then you know me to be a subscriber to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Wolo: So?
Shel: I can assure you, that in none of those many worlds do any Sheldon's listen to you... That's an infinite number of data points right there!
Wolo: Note to self: don't argue with crazy people.

Zen and the Art of Physics?

Last night I dived back into an old favourite: R.M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance, and found an anecdote that summarises a point I've been longing to make: why naive observation is a good thing. Here it is: a teacher asks his students to write an original essay about their home town. One student finds that she cannot write anything original about this abstract concept, so the teacher tells her to focus on an actual house in the town. She notices an interesting brick and is immediately able to say original things about this brick and work outwards from there.

I like this vignette because it illustrates a problem I have with the tendency in modern physics, art and other subjects, to model things that cannot be directly observed or tested. For example, abstract art, or, in physics: the big bang. For me, studies of the big bang represent humans hubristically trying to impose whatever is going on inside their heads (standard physics) on the universe, rather than humbly allowing the universe to change what is going on in their heads (ie: by learning). The solution is to allow reality to inspire new ideas, most efficiently by looking for observational anomalies closer to home (interesting bricks) without presupposing any theory.

Experiments and logic

At the moment the OPERA faster than light (FTL) result is far too uncertain to be trusted, and needs replication, but, in an article just published in New Scientist [1] (see below) R. Garisto argues that: "models which explain [the FTL] by breaking relativity are ruled out". He says he knows this because a recent paper by Cohen and Glashow [2] proposed that a neutrino going faster than light "may lose energy rapidly by bremsstrahlung", and the OPERA neutrinos did not, so they cannot have travelled FTL. Surely there is an error in logic here, since Garisto is effectively saying: you cannot violate standard physics unless you do it using standard physics.

Travelling faster than light violates standard physics in about the biggest way possible, and it is wrong to reject theories that explain experimental results (as Garisto says he has) by saying that they violate standard physics. Such an attitude would doom fundamental physics to an endless sterility. In physics, experiment (even if later shown to be flawed) must come first. If the OPERA result is supported experimentally, then standard physics is going to have to mumble sheepish apologies, and new physics will be needed. My point here is not that I think the OPERA result is necessarily correct, but rather that, in cases like this, objective logic should be applied, rather than a blind faith in standard physics.

[1] http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21515-lights-speed-limit-is-safe-for-now.html
[2] http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v107/i18/e181803

Underlying randomness

One of the courses I teach is climatology, and I try to emphasise both the observations and the maths and theory. In climatology there are a lot of simple balances. For example (to simplify): in the north Atlantic the wind pushes the water up into a wide bump centred on the Azores and the ocean currents flow clockwise around this bump producing Coriolis forces inwards that balance the pressure-gradient forces outwards. This produces a simple circular pattern (in geostrophic balance). I think this illustrates an interesting point: systems, like the ocean, jiggle around randomly, until one day, by chance, they find a balance, and it is the nature of balances, once set up, to remain, since they are stable. By the time we get around to observing it, and for most of the time, this simple balance is what we see. I guess this also applies to the rest of physics and is behind the simplicity and predictability of what we see in the world, but the crazy underlying randomness is always there, ready to return.