An asymmetric Casimir Effect

Until recently with MiHsC I had assumed that the Hubble-scale Casimir effect modifies standard inertia, and I hadn't specified a model for standard inertia. Recently I proposed such a model as follows. When you accelerate an object (the white circle in the diagram below) to the right, then beyond a certain distance to its left information can never catch up to it, so a Rindler horizon forms (see the shaded line) which is similar to the Hubble horizon in that it is a boundary to what can be known by the object. MiHsC proposes that the Unruh waves seen by an object as it accelerates have to fit exactly within the Hubble horizon. So this rule should also apply to the Rindler horizon on its left.

This produces an asymmetric Casimir effect since the Unruh waves to the right of the object are almost all allowed since the Hubble horizon is so far away that even very long waves fit, but the Unruh waves on the left will be fewer because only ones that fit into the much closer Rindler horizon are allowed. This creates a asymmetry in the Unruh radiation hitting the object and pushes it back to the left, against its acceleration. This is a new model for standard inertia.

I summed up all these forces in the paper below, and made a factor of two error in part of it, but if you correct the error* (in Eq. 4 change the first 4 to an 8) then the predicted inertial mass of a particle with a radius of one Planck length (lp) is (pi^2*h)/(48*c*lp) = 2.75x10^-8 kg which is 26% greater than the Planck mass of 2.176x10^-8 kg.

*=this error was kindly pointed out to me by J. Gine.

References

McCulloch, M.E., 2013. Inertia from an asymmetric Casimir effect. EPL, 101, 59001.
arXiv preprint: 1302.2775

Towards an Experimental Test

The Podkletnov (1992), Tajmar (2009) and Poher (2011) experiments all have a common theme that is consistent with MiHsC: in all three a sudden acceleration of masses in the vicinity of an object, causes that object to accelerate unexpectedly. In the Podkletnov case, the sudden vibrational acceleration of a superconducting disc caused a test mass to be less sensitive to the Earth's gravity, and lose weight, as if it has gained inertial mass (for the vibrational case only, MiHsC predicts 50% of this apparent weight loss). In the case of Tajmar, the sudden rotational acceleration of a metal ring caused an accelerometer near the ring to very slightly move with the ring, as if it had gained inertial mass and had then to move with the ring to conserve the momentum of the system (MiHsC predicts this case exactly, see McCulloch, 2011). In Poher's experiment, electrons were accelerated to huge speeds in a superconductor and then rapidly decelerated as they hit a non-superconducting layer. This caused a 'jump' in a nearby shielded accelerometer.

As far as the data allows, MiHsC is consistent with all three experiments, since it suggests that when an object suddenly sees nearby accelerations, the Unruh waves that are assumed to cause its inertial mass become shorter, and more of them fit within the Hubble scale, so the inertial mass increases in a new way, and to conserve momentum, anomalous motions occur. The Podkletnov and Poher experiments generate huge electron accelerations which allows the easier detection of the anomalous motion, but the problem is that the accelerations involved cannot be accurately quantified. For example, in the Poher experiment the electron acceleration is said to be "greater than 10^15 ms^-2" but cannot be pinned down to a specific acceleration that I can plug into MiHsC to test it. In contrast, the Tajmar experiment produces acceleration from a ring rotation so it is quantifiable, but the acceleration is tiny (2.5 ms^-2) so the anomalous motion is difficult to detect above noise.

The best way to easily and unambiguously test MiHsC would be to reproduce the huge accelerations of Podkletnov and Poher but make them quantifiable as in the Tajmar experiment. Any practical suggestions would be welcome!

References

Podkletnov, E.E. and R. Nieminen, 1992. A possibility of gravitational shielding by bulk YBa2Cu3O7-x superconductor, Physica C, 203: 441-444.

Poher, C., and D. Poher, 2011. Physical phenomena observed during strong electric discharges into layered Y123 superconducting device at 77K.

Tajmar, M., F. Plesescu, B. Seifert, 2009. Anomalous fiber optic gyroscope signals observed above spinning rings at low temperature, J. Phys. Conf. Ser, 150, 032101.

McCulloch, M.E., 2011. The Tajmar effect from quantised inertia. EPL, 95, 39002. http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.3266

Zombie physics

It is obvious to me that a recasting of physics is needed. This can be seen conceptually by saying that quantum mechanics is incompatible with general relativity, so one of them, at least, is wrong. On the observational side, anomalies are piling up, and some of them, like the anomalous dynamics of globular clusters, cannot hope to be explained by dark matter. Yet, there is still a huge stigma in physics against alternative theories. If you like, the ecosystem has too little diversity to be healthy. It seems that physicists today confronted with a fascinating anomaly will do anything: propose invisible matter or dimensions, rather than changing the core of Einstein's theories. This is even stranger since Einstein himself believed physics was incomplete & riddled with inconsistency.

I have a humourous analogy, to cheer me up on bad days, that some mainstream physicists are doing 'zombie physics'. The definition of a zombie: "a hypnotized person bereft of consciousness and self-awareness, yet ambulant and able to respond to surrounding stimuli." This is rather unfair, but I do think there is an important point here. Many career-minded physicists have been hypnotized by peer pressure, and are scared of thinking for themselves, being labelled as cranks & damaging their careers. This is making physics dull and sterile, & holding back human progress.

As a first solution I would like to propose a conference, that harks back to the Solvay conferences of the earlier 20th century, when physicists were bold and creative. This FreePhysics conference would invite the creators of new theories, but only if they agree to apply the theories to real anomalies. The theories could then all be objectively ranked depending on 1) their agreement with all the data, 2) simplicity and 3) self-consistency. I suspect it would be a noisy affair! Anyone want to second this?

Great things are done more through courage than through wisdom - German/English saying.

The web can set us free

The way a democracy is supposed to work is that we vote for the politicians we trust to make decisions for us, so we don't have to walk around all day agonising over whether tax money should be spent on roads or plumbing and we can think about more interesting and creative things instead. I would like to argue, as many are now also doing, that democracy does not exist in most of the western world and we have governments (in the UK of both main parties) who are not making decisions to benefit the people who voted for them, but to benefit big business. I'm sure others are better qualified to prove this, but I see the problem too and this blog is all I can do about it right now. What convinced me, among other things, are the following:

1: Iraq. I took part in a couple of huge, noble but futile marches in London against the Iraq war. The UK and US invaded Iraq anyway. I don't think there is much doubt that this war was crooked & financially driven. There are myriad reasons connected with oil & finance, eg: in 2000 Iraq converted its oil transactions from the dollar to the Euro. After the invasion they were moved back to the dollar. Transactions in its currency give the US financial leverage. Iran is also now trying to move from the dollar to the Euro.

2: NHS. The UK's National Health Service (NHS) was set up by an exhausted, bankrupt but egalitarian UK in 1948 and the government then promised to support 'all' from the cradle to the grave funded by taxes. This promise of support was diminished in 2012 by the HSC Act and of UK politicians voting on this Act 25% of them had shares in private medical companies (see Marcus Chown's twitter feed). This is so much of a scandal that people should be screaming about it, but the media have not mentioned it. The NHS is arguably the noblest thing any government has done for its people. Ill health is usually a case of bad luck and the NHS represents the great idea that someone should not have to be destroyed financially because of bad luck. Now, the UK government have started a process by which private companies will profit from our bad luck (lucrative, as there's a lot of it about) and also profit from the infrastructure that our taxes have set up. They will start small, but it could be the thin end of a huge wedge and eventually sickness could mean bankrupcy too. It is not inevitable yet, and some are fighting to stop it (eg: the National Health Action party).

3: NSA. It was bravely revealed by Edward Snowden that the UK & US governments have been spying on all governments and all peoples around the world (the US, against their own people & Constitution). The military, financial and other advantages this gives are obvious. What is also revealing is that a few days later Western European countries grounded a Bolivian plane because they thought the man who told them they were being spied on was about to overfly them. This shows they are more concerned about the opinion of the US than the privacy of their own people. Only Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua (& Russia, with a caveat) have had the courage to take action to support Snowden.

In the UK, the government is benefitting from an old fashioned illusion that the law abiding public is supposed to do what the government says. Not so: the government is supposed to do what the people say and they are not. Voting for a different party might fix the NHS (Labour has promised to repeal the HSC Act..) but it does not solve the overall problem because there are politicians in all the main parties connected to big business (I'm sure there are clean ones too).

It seems to me that we need to change the system so that politicians & the media cannot be influenced disproportionately by big business, make a law that politicians must have a 'normal' job before becoming MPs so they know the real world, strengthen journalists and protect free speech about all topics (what is not discussed openly eventually explodes as violence) and bring in direct democracy, as in Switzerland.

The internet (where spying can work both ways) is helping us to do this already. Assange's Wikileaks has shown us what governments are doing with our taxes and Twitter has enabled ordinary Turks, Egyptians and Brazilians to co-ordinate and challenge entreched powers in a way that unions once did. If we protect the web, it could free all of us in the way Gutenberg's printing eventually freed people from the absolute control of Kings and Popes (this freedom started the scientific revolution) but it will require a peaceful, but emphatic, persistence that the plutocracy must end.

The www, wikileaks, twitter, Assange, Greenwald, Snowden and Manning, and others like them are the keys to this societal shift. If they are supported then our civilisation will be truly enhanced. If they are silenced we will have lost this chance.

"The world is what we make of it" (Carl Sagan, Contact).

Summary of MiHsC papers

Here are some concise explanations of all the papers I've written on MiHsC so far, to show MiHsC's development over the years. I've presented the papers, warts and all, in order of their publication year:

2007. I assumed that inertial mass was caused by Unruh radiation, and subject to a Hubble-scale Casimir effect so that some Unruh waves are disallowed because they don't fit within the Hubble scale. This leads to a new loss of inertia for low accelerations. I applied this model (called MiHsC) to the trajectories of the Pioneer spacecraft and showed that the loss of inertia leads to an extra Sunward acceleration equal to the Pioneer anomaly. I remember the delighful comments of the reviewer of this paper who was amused by my use of the word 'forecast' instead of prediction (I worked at the UK Meteorological Office at the time) and said something like: 'I don't quite believe his solution, but it's more plausible than others that have been published, so..' Subsequent work by Turyshev et al. (2011) has proposed that the Pioneer anomaly could be due to an anisotropic radiation of heat, but the model they use is complex & there is no decay in the anomaly with time to back a thermal model. MNRAS, 376, 338-342.

2008a. The flyby anomalies are anomalous changes of a few mm/s in the speed of spacecraft flying by the Earth. In this paper I tried to model them by saying that when the craft pass through a zone where the net acceleration is low they lose inertial mass by MiHsC and speed up by momentum conservation. I spent the better part of a year modelling trajectories in my spare time, and it did not work because I did not yet consider mutual accelerations. However, here, I also suggested controlling inertia by bending Unruh waves using metamaterials. J.Br.Interplanet.Soc. 61: 373-378, 2008.

2008b. This paper was inspired by observations of Anderson et al (2008) that showed that the flyby anomaly was large when the spacecraft came towards the Earth at the Equator and left at the pole. When I downloaded the paper it upset me because I couldn't explain it, but then I realised with joy that I could model it using MiHsC if I considered the 'mutual' accelerations between masses, since the mutual acceleration between a spacecraft and masses in the spinning Earth is lower closer to the spin axis. MiHsC then predicts the craft's inertia is lower near the pole and to conserve momentum the craft speeds up. This models the flyby anomalies fairly well without adjustable parameters, but not perfectly. MNRAS-letters, 389(1), L57-60, 2008.

2010a. In this paper I applied MiHsC to the observations of Tajmar et al. (2006) who noticed an unexplained acceleration of accelerometers close to rotating rings. I took the idea of mutual accelerations further and considered the inertial mass of the accelerometer to be dependent (via MiHsC) on not only its acceleration with respect to the spinning ring but to the fixed stars too (with a nod to Ernest Mach). The idea was sound but I messed up the maths. I realised my error the night before I was due to give an important talk on it in Berne! I had to write another paper to correct it (see 2011a).

2010b. This was a more detailed look at the prediction by MiHsC that since Unruh waves lengthen as accelerations reduce, and because the Unruh waves cannot in principle be observed if they are greater than the Hubble scale, there must then be a minimum acceleration allowed in nature. I showed that this is close to the observed cosmic acceleration that is usually attributed to arbitrary 'dark energy'. MiHsC also predicts the observed minimum mass for disc galaxies seen by McGaugh et al (2009). In this paper I also suggested modifying the inertial mass of an object by interfering with Unruh radiation using EM radiation. EPL, 90, 29001.

2011a. I corrected my mathematical mistake (in 2010a) and MiHsC worked well but didn't fit one of Tajmar's results. When I emailed Tajmar he told me that particular result was due to a wrong stepper motor, so I was ecstatic. The prediction of MiHsC is that when the ring accelerates the accelerometer gains inertial mass and has to move with the ring to conserve the overall momentum of the system. MiHsC predicts the results very well, even the asymmetry between the clockwise & anticlockwise rotations of the ring. This paper and 2010a won "Best of Year" awards from the EPL journal. EPL, 95, 39002

2011b. This was my attempt to explain the weight loss seen by Podkletnov when he vibrated and span a superconducting disc below various test masses. MiHsC provided a possible explanation, but not a complete one and I couldn't go further because I had no way to know what the accelerations/vibrations of the disc were when it was spun. This paper on a controversial experiment led to me being consigned to gen-ph on the arxiv and led to a couple of critical letters being sent to my university faculty, but then great joy as the head of my School wrote an email supporting my academic freedom. Physics Procedia, 20, 134-139

2012. I must have submitted nearly six different papers several times each over four years trying to model a disc galaxy with MiHsC with different methods. With each rejection I tried again and my method became simpler till eventually, there was nothing for the reviewers to reject it on :) MiHsC predicts the rotation speeds of dwarf, disc and galaxy clusters within the errors bars without any adjustable parameters and most crucially: without dark matter. I have yet to model a galaxy in detail though. Ap&SS, 342, 2, 575-578

2013. In all the papers above I used a Hubble-scale Casimir effect to model 'deviations' from standard inertia, and just assumed standard inertia. In this paper I proposed that standard inertia is due to a Rindler-scale Casimir effect. As an object accelerates, say, to the right, a Rindler horizon forms to its left since information further away can never catch up. A Rindler-scale Casimir effect then suppresses Unruh waves on the left, so that the object feels more Unruh radiation pressure from the right. This pressure pushes it back against its acceleration: an elegant model for inertia that needs no adjustable parameters. This model also represents a new way of thinking about motion & energy in terms of horizons & information. EPL, 101, 59001.

Inertia here from masses there

The problem with astrophysical observations is that more than one theory can often fit the data and one can't change the experimental conditions to discriminate between them. Controllable experiments are preferable and one that I read about was the Tajmar experiment (Tajmar, 2009). In this experiment a ring made of various materials was put into a cryostat and cooled to 5 Kelvin. Laser gyroscopes to detect local accelerations were placed within a few cm of the ring but isolated from frictional contact. The ring was then rotated. The surprise was that the gyros accelerated very slightly in the same direction as the ring. The ratio between the acceleration of the ring and that of the gyros was 3±1.2x10^-8 for clockwise rotations of the ring, and half that for anticlockwise rotations (Tajmar, 2009). There is no explanation from standard physics for this 'dragging' effect, nor for the parity violation.

After a lot of thought and calculation, I found that these observations can be simply & exactly explained by MiHsC (see McCulloch, 2011) as follows. When the cryostat cools, the local mutual thermal accelerations decrease, so the only acceleration seen by the gyroscopes is that due to the fixed stars because they are fixed to the spinning Earth. This is a very small acceleration, so the Unruh waves the gyro sees are long and many are disallowed by MiHsC's Hubble-scale Casimir effect and the gyroscopes’ inertial mass decreases. When the ring is suddenly spun, this is a new large mutual acceleration, so now short Unruh waves are seen by the gyro, a greater proportion of them are allowed by the Hubble-scale Casimir effect so the inertial mass of the gyroscopes increases. To conserve the momentum of the combined gyro and ring system, the gyroscope has to move with the ring (momentum is mass*velocity, so if the mass of one component (the gyro) increases then the mutual velocity has to decrease). This predicts the observations exactly. MiHsC even predicts the parity asymmetry since when the ring moves clockwise, the gyros also move that way (by a third of the Earth’s rotation rate) so the apparent spin of the fixed stars is reduced by a third, and this increases the anomaly by the right amount. For anticlockwise rotations the opposite happens and the anomaly decreases. MiHsC predicts a coupling ratio of 2.67±0.24*10^-8 for clockwise rotations and 1.34±0.12*10^-8 for anticlockwise ones, in agreement with the observations. Unfortunately, Tajmar’s experiment has not been reproduced in another lab, but it is fairly clear that a reproduction of this experiment would be useful.

Specifically, MiHsC predicts that doing the experiment in the southern hemisphere should invert the parity asymmetry: the anticlockwise rotations should then have the larger effect. An attempt to reproduce one of Tajmar’s earlier experiments was made in New Zealand (Graham et al., 2008), but apparently the gyros were not sensitive enough so the results were inconclusive (there is some debate about that).

As I discussed in a previous blog (Beyond the Pail: Mach's Principle, July 2012) this particular prediction of MiHsC fits nicely with Mach's suggestion that "Inertia here is due to masses out there", ie the fixed stars.

References

Graham R.D., R.B.Hurst, R.J. Thirkettle, C.H. Rowe, P.H. Butler, 2008. Physica C, 468: 383.

Tajmar, M., F. Plesescu and B. Seifert, 2009. J. Phys. Conf. Ser., 150, 032101. Preprint.

McCulloch, M.E., 2011. The Tajmar effect from quantised inertia. EPL, 95, 39002. Preprint.

Space Darwinism

This will be a crucial century in human history, because a Moon or Mars base is likely to exist by 2030 or so and the first culture(s) to make it off the planet in self-sufficient amounts will get a head start and so will likely dominate the rest of human history in an even more extreme way than European cultures now dominate in the Americas.

Which cultures will it be? The lead contenders so far are the Chinese, the Russians and the US. The Russians are the smaller country by population, but are consistently capable, and have a kind of destiny about them - it was Tsiolkovski who started it all. The American record is unsurpassed (eg: the Moon landing) and one should never underestimate their talent for inventing, and importing, new and quicker ways to do things - and then throwing them away in the short term rush for monetary or political gain. The Chinese are coming from behind, but for much of human history they were the most advanced culture, and their traditions have provided them with a huge, talented, population. They are now arguably ahead of the US because they have an active manned program. The technologically-gifted Japanese, the clever Indians and Europe with its great tradition of logic & science are also contenders. The more the merrier..

As is usual with life, the cultures that reproduce (ie: set up a self-sufficient colony off planet, that has the potential to grow) will be the ones that push outwards into deep space and will eventually dominate history. I would not like to even predict which cultures these should be. Nature, in its wisdom, will decide in a Darwinian way. The ones with the most desire and capability for space travel will also be the best ones to take humans (or whatever we become) across the galaxy more quickly.

There is a deep imperative in all life to grow and spread. Look at nature and the huge effort all life makes to reproduce. A stay-at-home mentality, stagnation and extinction would be a huge waste of millenia of human struggle & history. We should add our unique voice, whatever its accent, to whatever is going on out there.