The cosmos is a black hole?

When I was writing the first paper proposing MiHsC (a model for inertia) in 2006 I played around briefly in the discussion section with black holes. Hawking (1974) said that more massive black holes (mass=M) have a lower temperature (so T=K/M, where K is a constant). Wien (1893) said that an object of temperature T emits radiation of wavelength L, and T=k/L (k being another constant). These formulae mean that the more massive the black hole, the longer the wavelength of Hawking radiation it emits.

However, we can't see beyond the Hubble-scale so waves longer than this should not exist (following Ernst Mach). This means that a black hole can't be so massive that the Hawking radiation it emits is bigger than the observable universe. I showed that this predicts a maximum black hole mass of about 10^52 kg and put this into the paper as a curiosity. A year later I read that the mass of the observable universe is about 10^52 kg, with a large error bar. Does this agreement imply that the universe is a black hole? Later, I turned this model inside out and had the cosmos as a black hole emitting radiation inwards from its edge whose wavelengths had to fit exactly into the cosmos (in the same way as the Unruh waves in MiHsC have to) and a toy cosmology was born. I wrote a paper on it and went to the Cosmo-2008 conference in Wisconsin, funded by the Royal Astronomical Society and the Institute of Physics to present it (you can still find my Cosmo-08 .ppt slides on the web).

For six years I have been submitting this cosmology paper, having it rejected, and working to improve it, and I have gradually realised that the model predicts that the universe gains mass as it expands, like the old Steady State Theory of Sir Fred Hoyle. That theory was discredited when the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) showed that the early universe was hot. The Steady State Theory couldn't explain that and the rival Big Bang Theory could. The Hubble-scale Casimir effect model though, predicts that the universe must have been hotter when it was smaller, so it produces a Steady State Theory that predicts a Cosmic Microwave Background too.

Cosmology is notoriously data-poor so, since I like to stay close to the data, in the paper I also show that if you apply the dis-allowal of longer waves (the Hubble-scale Casimir effect of MiHsC) to patterns of variation in the cosmos, this predicts a drop-off of variation on the largest scales that agrees well with the 'low-l CMB anomaly' seen in the recent Planck satellite data.

In the paper I also describe an alternative way to think about the Hubble-scale Casimir effect, or 'cosmic seiche' of MiHsC that is more natural. Happily, the journal 'Galaxies' is open access, so a pdf of the paper can be found at the link below:

References

McCulloch, M.E., 2014. A toy cosmology using a Hubble-scale Casimir effect. Galaxies, 2(1), 81-88. Abstract and link to free pdf.

A diversity of ideas means faster progress.

There are many dull periods in history where the suppression of new ideas held up progress. The Inquisition burned books and drove science out of southern Europe to the benefit of northerners. Nowadays, I'd like to argue that a pointless conformity in western theoretical physics is suppressing badly-needed alternatives to standard physics.

As an example: four months ago I published a paper in the scientific literature that derives gravity in a new way from quantum mechanics (see reference below). Something very new. I'm not saying I'm right, I simply don't know yet, but what I would say is that it is interesting and unique, maybe useful, and crucially: already published. I uploaded this paper to the arXiv, hoping to stimulate some useful debate, which I badly need to further build on it, and four months later anonymous people are still mulling over whether to include or reject it, as if the arXiv is its own journal.

The arXiv is a kind of 'public library' that is supposed to reflect what goes on in the scientific community and make it freely available to all, a noble goal, unless it becomes hijacked by a anonymous group with a bias, in which case the arXiv becomes something else entirely: a way for a biased minority to steer the scientific community their way, circumventing the proper evidence-based scientific debate (this avoidance is useful if you have no evidence at all).

I doubt anyone from the arXiv understands the long-term negative impact of what they are doing, I'm sure they are content to be in the 'cool' crowd, but standard/current physics is provably wrong: it only predicts 4% of the cosmos, it is not even self-consistent, as Einstein knew way back in 1935. The suppression of un-cool alternatives simply delays progress, and game-changing technologies we might have had sooner will be lost, perhaps for decades.

On the other hand if the arXiv return to their job, and objectively reflect all the debates occuring in the scientific peer-reviewed literature then theoretical physics can only gain: it may even cease debating cool but untestable and useless subjects like the interior of black holes and will become evidence-based and scientific again. Inevitably this will make it more useful, practical and interesting.

My, maybe flawed, but interesting paper was published in Astrophysics and Space Science and is: here.

What's up with the gravity constant?

I'm looking into an interesting possible anomaly in the gravitational constant, the big G that appears in Newton's gravity law: F = GMm/r^2. Gravity is a tiny force, atom for atom, but it is cumulative unlike the electromagnetic (EM) force whose positive and negative components cancel themselves out, so for large masses (M and m) and close distances (r) gravity can dominate the EM force, for example causing chairs, held together by the EM force, to collapse when sat on.

In 1798, Cavendish worked out a way to measure G. He suspended known masses at both ends of a crossbar suspended by a wire, brought another known mass closer at an angle designed to cause a rotation and measured the twist in the wire. Since he know how much force was required to twist the wire, this told him the gravitational force F between the masses and since F = GMm/r^2, and he knew the mass and distances, he was able to find G. Over the centuries, this method has been refined so that the experimental uncertainty in the values they now get for G is smaller. The problem is, the values of G determined in different labs differ several times more than their expected uncertainty, so either the experimenters have underestimated their errors or a new physical process has been revealed.

Always on the lookout for anomalies, I've had a look at some of the values of G published in the third figure in a recent Physics World article (see the reference below) and noticed that there is a weak correlation with latitude. For example, the G that was measured in Birmingham, UK (at 52^o North) was 0.05% larger than the G measured in Boulder, Colorado (at 40^o North). Although the correlation between the various values for G and the latitude is 0.74, there were only 7 values given in this Figure to go on, so I wouldn't claim significance yet.

I do wonder whether MiHsC is causing this, since the acceleration of objects on the Earth with respect to the fixed stars is lower near the poles, but my initial calculations show that the MiHsC effect seems too small. It may be that I need to learn more about what these experiments are actually doing, so I'm going to a Royal Society Workshop on the uncertainties in G at the end of this month to learn a bit more about this problem.

Reference

Cartwright, J., 2014. "The lure of G". Physics World, Vol. 27, 2, 2nd February.

Conservation of Energy+Mass+Information?

Here's an attempt to put MiHsC in context. A long time ago Galileo performed carefully timed experiments rolling balls down inclined planes and found that as height was lost, speed was gained in a particular way. This was later modeled using two interchangable kinds of energy: kinetic (speed) and potential (height) and their sum was found to be nearly conserved: PE + KE = constant (some energy leaks to smaller scales as friction, and that is where thermodynamics appears). Then Einstein explosively predicted that one can convert a tiny bit of mass to lots of energy, and reversewise (E=mc^2) so that now mass-energy was conserved: mass + energy = constant. What I think MiHsC is telling us, is that what is actually conserved is:

Energy + Mass + Information = constant

This sum is a 'property' consisting of energy, mass and information that you could call 'EMI', so that EMI is conserved. What might this mean for a real experiment?

Consider a ring in a cryostat, that is suddenly spun. Tajmar et al. found that a nearby gyroscope moved slightly to follow the ring, despite there being no frictional connection. MiHsC predicts this exactly, since the sudden acceleration increases the inertial mass of the gyroscope and to conserve the momentum of the gyro+ring system the gyro has to move with the ring. Can we interpret MiHsC as EMI conservation? Perhaps. When you accelerate the ring, the Rindler horizon seen by the gyroscope, which sees a mutual acceleration, comes closer to it, so it looses information about its environment (I'm not sure how to calculate this yet). To conserve EMI it must gain mass-energy, or inertial mass (this agrees qualitatively with MiHsC).

Conversely as an object's acceleration reduces as it moves away from concentrations of mass into deep space, the Rindler horizon it sees moves away and it gains information (I), so EM must be lost. Therefore inertial mass decreases and the object is more sensitive to external forces and accelerates again. The minimum acceleration of 6.7*10^-10 m/s^2 occurs when the Rindler horizon coincides with the Hubble horizon since then no more information can be gained. The thing now is to see if the maths of this idea predicts the right sort of behaviour..

A New Natural Motion.

As Smolin says (in Time Reborn) "Revolutions in physics can be marked by changes in what is considered natural motion", motion without forces applied. The Greeks thought that natural motion was a dead stop (but this was friction). Galileo showed instead that natural motion was a constant velocity. This enabled him to argue that the Earth was moving around the Sun as Copernicus had said, and explain how this could be so without the Earth leaving a trail of debris behind it in its orbit.

MiHsC might offer a new such revolution since it changes the natural state of motion from Galileo's constant speed to a tiny minimum acceleration of 2c^2/Theta, where c is the speed of light, and Theta is the Hubble distance. This occurs because in MiHsC inertia is caused by Unruh waves and their length increases as accelerations reduce. When accelerations are as low as 2c^2/Theta the Unruh waves exceed the size of the observable universe and this cannot be allowed, since, if it was, the waves would allow us to determine what lies outside the observable universe, which is a paradox. So this information censorship makes the Unruh waves, and inertial mass, dissapear at low accelerations, causing the object to accelerate more with the same outside force - hence the minimum allowed acceleration.

This minimum acceleration is close to the recently-observed cosmic acceleration. It is also likely to change in time, since the size of the observable universe (Theta) increases in time, and the speed of light may vary too. Does this have far reaching consequences, as Galileo's inertia had for the heliocentric theory? At the moment I'm in the process of publishing a paper that shows it produces a cosmology similar to the old Steady State Theory of Fred Hoyle, in which the gravitational mass of the universe increases in time, but MiHsC also predicts a hot early universe, that Steady State didn't. I am just working to publish this, so hopefully I can get it past peer review.

Smolin, L., 2013. Time reborn. Penguin Books Ltd.

McCulloch, M.E., 2010. Minimum accelerations from quantised inertia. EPL, 90, 29001.

McCulloch, M.E., 2014. A toy cosmology from a Hubble-scale Casimir effect, Galaxies, Special Issue.

An Introduction to MiHsC / quantised inertia

The idea of inertia is that in a vacuum, where there is no friction, objects move along in a straight line at constant speed until you push on them. This tendency was first isolated by Galileo, who rolled balls down inclined planes (balls feel less friction). This tendency, inertia, has always been assumed but never explained.

Meanwhile physics has moved towards a study of information, and it has been realised in the past few decades that when you accelerate something, say, to the right, information from far to the left can never catch up to it, this means there is an information-boundary or 'horizon' to its left which is like a black hole event horizon (it is called a Rindler horizon). A kind of Hawking radiation comes off this horizon, which is called Unruh radiation (it was proposed by Bill Unruh) and is seen as background radiation, but is seen only by the accelerated object (there is some evidence for Unruh radiation eg: Smolyaninov, 2008).

I have suggested that the waves of Unruh radiation cause inertia as follows: the waves have to fit exactly between the rightwards-accelerating object and the Rindler horizon that forms on the left. This is similar in form to the Casimir effect, but I use logic instead: a non-fitting partial wave would allow us to infer what lies beyond the horizon, so it wouldn't be a horizon anymore. This logic disallows Unruh waves that don't fit on the left: they dissappear. As a result more Unruh radiation pressure hits the object coming from the right than from the left and this imbalance pushes it back against its acceleration, just like inertia. I have shown that this effect is the right size to provide a mechanism for inertia, and so can explain it for the first time (paper) (there's a factor of 2 error in the paper, when corrected the result is within 29% of the Planck mass). An analogy is a boat near a seawall. Seaward of it, waves of all wavelengths can exist for there is no boundary, but between it and the seawall fewer waves can fit: only those that have 'nodes' (the unmoving part of the wave) at the wall and boat. As a result more waves hit the boat from the seaward side, pushing it on average towards the seawall.

It does not end there, however, because, to be tested, a model needs to predict something unexpected, and this model for inertia does. There is also a horizon much further away, at the Hubble horizon, so even to the right of the object some of the Unruh waves are disallowed, especially the very long Unruh waves that you get if the object has a very low acceleration. The new prediction then is that objects with very low acceleration lose inertial mass in a new way. This model for inertia can be called: Modified inertia by a Hubble-scale Casimir effect (MiHsC) or quantised inertia.

In this way, MiHsC solves a problem astronomers have had with galaxies. They are spinning so fast that they should centrifugally explode. Oddly, they don’t explode, so astronomers have had to invent invisible ‘dark’ matter and add it to the galaxies to hold them together with extra gravitational pull. This is a ‘patch’ since it is not predictive: you have to add dark matter 'by hand' to get agreement between standard gravity and the observed spin of the galaxy. Interestingly, the stars at the galaxy’s edge (the ones misbehaving) have low accelerations, so see very long Unruh waves, and MiHsC predicts a loss of inertial mass for them, that reduces the centrifugal outward force on them by just the right amount to make everything fit, see here and here. MiHsC then is an alternative explanation of why galaxies do not break up with the centrifugal forces, and is better than the dark matter hypothesis and MoND because there is only one way to apply MiHsC, and that way works (McCulloch, 2012).

MiHsC also explains other observed anomalies, for example: the recently-observed cosmic acceleration, the low-l cosmic microwave background anomaly (a suppression of patterns at the Hubble scale), the controversial lab experiments of Podkletnov (1992) and Tajmar (2009), the flyby anomaly, the emdrive, and others.. Here is a summary of all these tests.

MiHsC is not fully developed yet, and to do this I need to persuade it to show itself in a controllable and repeatable lab experiment (in progress) but, if confirmed, there are applications. MiHsC predicts that when you suddenly accelerate something (eg: spin a disc very fast) the disc, and objects nearby, should gain a bit of inertial mass and to conserve momentum they will move anomalously: a new way to move things. More generally, MiHsC predicts that whenever you put a horizon into the zero point field it creates a gradient in it that can pull on objects. MiHsC also predicts that you can’t have a constant velocity, zero acceleration, since the Unruh waves would then be longer than the Hubble scale, and none would fit, so inertia would collapse. This modifies special relativity’s insistence on a speed of light limit, and the predicted (tiny) acceleration agrees with the observed cosmic acceleration, as noted above.

An unambiguous spin test.

MiHsC (quantised inertia) gives an explanation for the galaxy rotation problem and cosmic acceleration, but other proposals like dark matter are flexible enough that they can also explain these observations. What is needed is a controlled laboratory experiment that can test MiHsC with no ambiguity.

The consequence of MiHsC is that if any object accelerates, then the inertial mass of all nearby objects increases slightly. One experiment that involved a huge change in acceleration was that of Podkletnov et al. (1992). They cooled a super-conducting disc (so there was little thermal acceleration) and then suddenly rotated and vibrated it (high acceleration). Sure enough, nearby objects appeared to lose weight, just as if they had gained a bit of inertia and were less sensitive to gravity (specifically objects above the disc). In some ways this is a good test of MiHsC since the change in acceleration is so large that the MiHsC effect is more easily detectable. The disadvantage is that this experiment is hard to reproduce since the half-superconducting disc is difficult to make.

Another experiment was done by Tajmar et al. (2009) who noted nearby horizontal (not vertical) acceleration anomalies in laser gyroscopes close to a spinning supercooled Teflon ring. This anomaly is exactly predicted by MiHsC, but the disadvantage of this experiment is that the disc accelerations are small so the effects are difficult to detect and reproduce, and the accelerometers (laser gyroscopes) needed are more complex than simply measuring weight.

A better experiment would include a bit of both and would go as follows: 1) cool a Teflon disc down to 5K in a cryostat (Teflon survives low temperatures), 2) suspend a test mass (say 30g) over the disc's edge (to get maximum mutual acceleration) from a pivoted cross bar, and suspend another mass from the other end onto a precision balance (with milligram sensitivity), 3) spin the disc as fast as possible and monitor the weight of the test mass. MiHsC predicts that for a disc with a radius of 5 cm and spun at, for example, 10,000 rpm and 30,000 rpm, the test mass will gain inertial mass and appear to lose 0.017% (5.1 mg) and 0.16% (48 mg) of its weight respectively (see eq. 11 of McCulloch, 2011). Maybe in 2014 a test can be done.. Happy New Year!

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