Far and Away

Possibly the best way to test Quantised Inertia (except in the lab and the lockdown has postponed that for now) is to look at far distant (ie: high redshift) galaxies whose light is reaching us from an epoch a long time ago. This is because QI's predictions of galaxy rotation are very different from those of the standard model and MoND at high redshift. For the older theories the relation between the orbital speed of stars at the edge of galaxies (v) is of the type

v^4 = KM

where M is the visible mass and K, crucially, is a constant. How quaint! In quantised inertia the K is no longer a constant, since the inertial mass depends on the width of the cosmic horizon, and the formula is

v^4 = (2Gc^2/Theta)M

where G is the gravitational constant, c is the speed of light and Theta is the width of the cosmos, which varies with time. In the mainstream way of looking at it, this variation is because the cosmos is physically expanding. I prefer to assume that the information that local matter has about the cosmos is expanding, rather than the cosmos itself (this was also claimed by Halton Arp). Therefore in the past the cosmos, and Theta, were smaller and so, according to QI, all inertial masses and centrifugal forces were lower. Therefore far-off, ancient galaxies could afford to spin faster at the same mass and still remain bound.

As luck would have it, astronomers are just starting to see such galaxies and I talked about six of them in the paper referenced below (McCulloch, 2017). It turns out that they do indeed spin faster. Another one has just been seen at Z=4.2 which is called, romantically, DLA0817g or The Wolfe Disk (see Neeleman, 2020) and this means I can now compare QI with seven data points. I have summarised the data here:

The plot shows the observed acceleration of stars at the edge of the galaxies (y axis) and you can see that it increases with redshift (black dots). See the black dots. Note that the value for the galaxy at redshift Z=2.242 is aberrant and it looks like an outlier. The plot also shows (blue dots) the predicted accelerations assuming, as quantised inertia does, that the galaxies cannot slow below the minimum acceleration of 2c^2/Theta where Theta is the cosmic scale at the epoch the galaxy is in. So, to recapitulate, the higher redshift galaxies were in a smaller cosmos, so according to QI all inertial masses were lower, so they could afford to spin faster and still remain stable. You can see that the predictions of quantised inertia track the observed increase in spin quite well. This is not yet conclusive though, since maybe other effects are present. The next step is to compare what Newton/GR predicts for the same plot, but for that I need to find the masses of these systems, which is not as easy as it sounds since some masses are derived from the dynamics so include the dark matter fudge. What is clear from this is that the more high redshift galaxies we observe in this way the better!

References

Neeleman, M., J.X. Prochaska, N. Kanekar, M. Rafelski, 2020. A cold massive, rotating disc 1.5 billion years after the big bang. Nature, Vol. 581. Link

McCulloch, M.E., 2017. Galaxy rotations from quantised inertia and visible matter only. Astrophysics and Space Science, 362,149. Link

Physics with an Edge & Thank Yous

Those with an keen eye may have noticed that I have changed my blog title from Physics from the edge to Physics WITH an Edge, which reflects the fact that QI predicts better than the old physics and is perhaps no longer at the fringe.

To my great joy, a couple of week ago my best friend at primary school, who is now an eminent surgeon, recently got back in touch after 40 years. One of my earliest and fondest memories is of talking to him about the need for interstellar travel during a sleep-over at his house. According to Nick Hornby friends are people who like what you like. So in his honour, I'd like to thank some of the people who have contributed to QI and who I regard as friends:

Alex Unzicker. When I first started publishing on quantised inertia I felt alone, since physicists did not seem to be interested in the old style of physics, that is data-driven with a dash of philosophy. Then I read this honest paper by Unzicker which is still one of my favourite reads and has been a inspiration to me: Link. More recently I have been reading his books and they are full of the same irreverent, data-driven and philosophical attitude. People often lament that theoretical physics would still be honest if Feynman was in it. Dr Unzicker provides the same role. We have skype'd in the past and I hope we can do so again many times. His latest book: Link

Jaume Gine. I first emailed Jaume in 2011 to mildly criticise his interpretation of my work and it is to his credit, and my gain, that we have collaborated on several papers since then. If you look at the record of our collaboration you will see that he is a more accurate mathematician than I am, and he has also prodded me towards interpretations of QI using thermodynamics. He is now helping me to publish a paper I've worked on since 1992 on the EPR paradox, adding the details that I omitted in my typically simple approach. Our most recent collaboration includes a complete derivation of QI just from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: Link

Travis Taylor. I first came across Travis Taylor when he emailed me in 2017 to say that he'd written a paper about my work, but the journal had insisted he remove all mention of my work and put in dark matter! To his credit he emailed me instead. I suggested he submit to the J. of the British Interplanetary Society, which was at that time open minded, & it was published. Travis is Carl Sagan's ideal: both seriously competent and open minded, but the skill I most appreciate in him is making theories practically testable. In the aforementioned paper he pointed out that quantised inertia predicts that an emdrive based on visible light would work far better. His paper made QI more testable & DARPA contacted me shortly afterwards. His paper: Link

Jesus Lucio. When I received DARPA funding I advertised for a post-doc. If I'd received no applications it might have gone south, but luckily I received one: Dr Jesus Lucio. I really was saved by Jesus, and since then he has worked brilliantly, not only developing the cavity thrust model required, but adding a capability to optimise the cavity shape, in real time on the screen, and helping me with papers - particularly models and graphics. It is a shame that covid lockdown has ended our chats over coffee since I regard him now as a friend as well as a colleague and, sadly for me, he goes back to Spain next month. Our first published collaboration is: Link

There are many more people that I want to thank in future, such as M. Renda (who wrote the first serious criticism of QI - very useful to me), Z. Komala (who has been doing ingenious QI experiments) and others, but the four above make a nicely closed story for today. I will write another of these thank yous soon. I mean it: Thank you!

QI in the Time of Corona

Prof Martin Tajmar recently told me that being confined to the home, probably doesn't make a difference to me because I'm a theorist. He's right - I've been largely home-working for years, but the coronavirus is now holding up his experiments, the experiments of the Spanish team, and also I can't meet with my post-doc Jesus for discussions.

However, the global shutdown is an ideal opportunity to think, and also to appeal to other theorists while they are perhaps less affected by peer pressure. So my aim over the next few weeks is to combine various bits of theory I already have to finish an informational version of quantised inertia: one which predicts inertial mass and thrust as before, but also gravity, including the value of G, & I'd like to have a stab at particle masses too. As part of that I have submitted several papers.

In the first of these papers I derive quantised inertia from the destruction of information that occurs as objects accelerate and their information horizons shrink. QI drops out this in seven lines of maths! This is a boost for John Wheeler's It from Bit idea, because, if quantised inertia can be derived from information theory, then that means that galaxy rotation, hence most of the cosmos, can be also, without any silly dark matter. I submitted this paper to Astrophysics and Space Science (and I heard today it has been provisionally accepted! - subject to minor modification).

The second paper, submitted to Acta Astronautica, is a collaboration with my post-doc Dr Jesus Lucio. We outline the numerical QI cavity model that he coded, and the optimised cavities it predicts. We were going to include a footnote on the encouraging results from Tajmar, but that has been vetoed. The model predicts that firing a laser or LED light into a particularly-shaped metal cavity beats industry-standard ion drives without even needing fuel, so this is a paper that could be game changing for the satellite industry.

The third paper, that I have just submitted to Entropy, is even more radical and shows that if you take an asymmetric cavity, as above, and shrink it down to 91 nm or so, then you don't even need to fire a laser into it. The energy from the quantum vacuum produces thrust by itself. Here, I am simply allowing the maths to take me to a completely mad place that implies the future construction of floating bricks and buildings - of the kind I like to make when I play Minecraft with my son. The derivation may be bold but it is simple and logical, so why not? When the world starts up again, it might well be starting up with a stronger & more useful version of physics.

MORPH, Information & Ancient Dreams

I've not written this blog for a while, not because there is too little to say, but because there is too much going on! Also now some news is off limits because I am working with experimentors who do not like their results broadcast before they are 100% sure. Nevertheless, I will tell you as much as possible. The most important news to hint at is that I am very happy with the (inconclusive) lab tests so far.

The second advance is thanks to my post-doc Jesus Lucio who has produced a brilliant piece of matlab code, based on my uncertainty principle version of QI, that predicts the thrust expected when a laser of given wavelength and power is fired into a cavity of given shape and composition, and we have had many hours of fun playing with it. This code is also able to optimise the shape of the cavity to maximise the thrust and that is an amazing thing to see on screen - the shape morphs before your very eyes. So, I've named the model MORPH (Model of Reaction-less Propulsion by Horizons) also in honour of a character from an old program called 'Take Hart'. We have written a paper on the model and submitted it to EPL.

More good news is that other tests are now starting in various places. For example, a consortium that I have been talking to based at the University of Southern California has just received funding to test QI in the lab, using an experimental method devised by one of them that I am desperate to tell you about because it is so elegant, but can't yet. There are other tests occurring in the US and Poland.

I have been busy advancing QI theory which has been through three phases now. In the first phase (2007-2013) I derived the quantised inertial mass by damping the Unruh radiation field around objects with horizons, but you had to accept then that photons have momentum, and that just pushes the origin of inertia backwards to photons. In the second phase (2014-now) I derived QI from the uncertainty principle, which was neater, and also predicted Newtonian gravity, but you have to assume things interact in chunks of a Planck mass. The 3rd phase began in 2018 when I managed, with J. Gine, to derive QI approximately from information theory. Recently, sparked by a paper by M. Vopson on mass and information, I revisited that and managed to derive QI exactly. It also requires a separation into bits but that flows naturally from information theory anyway! I have just submitted a paper to Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

When I was studying for my physics degree at York (1988-1991) I had a crazy recurring dream about being able to levitate objects that I felt was significant, but put it aside to get on with life. Afterwards I ended up in ocean physics, a crucial step because of the ocean-wave analogy. When I proposed QI (to explain some space-craft & galaxy dynamics) I was back in fundamental physics & slowly realised that QI predicts thrust. Very recently I've shown that QI predicts materials that 'float' without power, and I've just submitted a paper on that. This brings me all the way back to that dream in 1990 & makes me wonder whether my subconscious knows more than I do..!

From Galactic Scales to Lab Scales.

The best way to bring about the revolution in physics that we all need - getting rid of dark matter and dark energy, unifying physics and making propellant-less thrusters and new energy sources possible - is to demonstrate QI in the lab. That is being attempted by the two groups I am funding using DARPA funds. I am not at liberty to divulge what they are finding - not due to DARPA but because the experimenters wish their results to be held back till they are sure. This is understandable but their results at least have given me an indication of what might work. I'd like to get many groups to try horizon drives for themselves and this is my attempt to explain how to do that. Please note I am not an experimenter, yet, so my suggestions may be naive in some way - you may well know better, so feel free to tell us all in the comments below. Everyone is welcome, even careful unpublished results will be useful, though most useful would be groups who know how to be uber-careful about artifacts & how to publish in journals.

The Experiment:

1. Make or buy an asymmetric metal resonance chamber (emdrive shaped or similar) that has a very reflective inside wall, so that light of the wavelength you are going to use will bounce around inside it many times before being dissipated as heat (high Q).

2. Place this cavity with its narrow end pointing up, on a digital balance (scale) capable of measuring a change in weight of preferably 0.01 mg (depending on your setup, see point 4), with a fast enough response time that sudden 'jumps' can be seen (see point 5) and able to log data to a PC.

3. Decide some way to get light into the cavity. This could either involve firing a laser in through a hole or using a fibre-optic, or placing a light source in there, eg: an LED with attached battery/capacitor (less efficient as multiple reflections will be reduced). Try to avoid having cables going into your cavity - they produce em forces & external mechanical forces.

4. Activate the light source. QI roughly predicts a thrust force of F ~ PQ/c, where c is the speed of light. So, for example for a light source with power P = 4W and for a cavity with a Q (number of internal reflections) of 100 the force is 1.3 microN and the weight change is 0.13 mg.

5. Plot a time series of the force before and after activation of the light. The QI thrust (if there) will show up as an initial jump at switch on. Any effects due to heating should be slower. These two effects can be isolated as Sonny White did in his 2016 emdrive paper (see references).

Please make sure that the expected QI thrust given by your P and Q is bigger than the scale's sensitivity (ie: watch your Ps and Qs!). The full QI thrust formula is F=PQL/c x ((1/wb)-(1/ws)) where L = length of cavity, and ws and wb are the width of the small and big ends. The way to enhance the QI effect is to improve the reflectivity of the inside of the cavity (higher Q), boost the power of the light source (higher P) or change the shape (L, wb/ws). I am intending to try this for myself, but as the German proverb goes "Einmal ist keinmal, zweimal ist immer". "Once is never, twice is forever", or to use the scientific expression "Things must be repeated to be sure". As I said above I am a theorist, so some of my suggestions here will be naive in some sense. Please tell all of us in the comments if you see a better way!

Acknowledgements. The above experimental plan has benefited from others such as M. Tajmar, J-L Perez-Diaz, Russ George and T. Taylor. Also many others on twitter who have made suggestions. Thank you!

References

McCulloch, M.E., 2018. Propellant-less propulsion from quantised inertia. J. Space Explo. 2018 Vol: 7(3). https://www.tsijournals.com/abstract/propellantless-propulsion-from-quantized-inertia-13923.html

White, H., P. March, J. Lawrence, J. Vera, A. Sylvester, D. Brady and P. Bailey, 2016. J. Propulsion and Power. doi:10.2514/1.B36120 https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/1.B36120

Digesting Arp's Kebab

There is a certain comfort in these uncertain times, and I like doing this at any time, in focusing on a non-human puzzle that has a chance of making sense. The puzzle I've been focusing on over the past few weeks is one that is brilliantly explained in Halton Arp's book 'Seeing Red' (see the reference below) and after many weeks of boiling it down to its essentials I've summarised it in this plot.

The plot shows the Sol star system in the centre. Observations show that as you look at galaxies further and further away they are increasingly red-shifted. So I've varied the colours on the plot from blue-green in the middle to red around the edge. This red-shifting was discovered by Edwin Hubble in 1929 and was assumed to be a Doppler shift caused by the stars moving away from us, but not so fast!

Along came William Tifft in 1973 who found that these red-shifts are quantized or 'stepped' as shown in the plot by the areas of uniform colour. Galaxies appear to be moving away from us only at certain preferred speeds. This is still being contested, but on balance it looks to be true and this is incompatible with the Big Bang / expansion hypothesis. The mainstream usually explain cosmic expansion by talking about an expanding balloon. We are at one point on it, and as it expands all other galaxies move away from us, like dots on the balloon. The further ones move away faster. The problem is that the only way to get it to work for stepped speeds is to say that the Sun is at a privileged centre of the cosmos, and even cosmologists are not arrogant enough to claim that.

Then along came Halton Arp who started by looking at observations with an unusually clear sight, which is why I admire him. He spotted that some low-red-shift active galaxies (such as the green one in the plot) have quasars next to them that have high red-shift (red circles). The red-shift decays with distance, see the red-orange-yellow circles that look a bit like a kebab (someone on twitter sent me a picture of a kebab in response to the above plot). Mainstream astronomers insisted "No, the quasars are a long way behind the galaxies in the distant background & so they must be putting out a thousand times as much power as the Milky Way to be seen!!" but Arp was sure the quasars were connected to the nearby galaxies - sometimes even linking tendrils could be seen. This also meant that the quasars didn't have to be so ridiculously powerful - not so far away.

This convinced him that a high red-shift does not necessarily mean great distance, and once a barrier breaks down in one place, the chaos tends to spread, especially if you are as stubborn as Arp who has a certain similarity to Fritz Zwicky or Fred Hoyle. He applied this idea to the red-shifts seen in distant galaxies and suggested that that occurs because the light we see from them was emitted long ago when the cosmos was young and objects had a smaller view of the whole and there is 'some' intrinsic process that predicts a lower inertial mass for a young small cosmos (sounds familiar?). This means that when matter was/is first formed, it forms atoms whose electrons have less inertial mass, so the electron orbitals are closer together (less centrifugal force) and so they emit less energetic photons and produce red-shifted light. This accounts for the distant/early galaxies and also the quasars close to the galaxies which appear to have been newly-formed and emitted from those galaxies. An important point is that it is possible to explain the stepping or quantisation using an intrinsic red-shift but it is not using the Doppler/Hubble model.

Quantised inertia looks to be an excellent candidate to explain the above process. In QI the inertial mass is caused by the zero point field (Unruh radiation) which would have been weaker in the early cosmos because fewer quantum waves can exist in a smaller perceived volume (horizon). This explains the cosmic red-shifts and should explain their quantisation, though the numbers still elude me. It also fits with the quasars emitted from the galaxies: if this is new matter being formed then it sees a smaller cosmos (closer horizon) since it has not had chance to collect information from far away, so, again, inertia is weaker.. The proof of this will be in whether QI can predict the values of the quantisation. The observed red-shifts are for example: Z=0.06, 0.3, 0.6, 0.96, 1.41, 1.96 and 2.64. I am working on this now, looking at a Bohr model with varying 'qinertial' mass.

In any event, apparently Arthur C Clarke was ahead of Halton Arp in his imagination. Arp went to see him in Sri Lanka to tell him about it, and, he hoped, surprise him. He told ACC that "Unexplained gamma radiation was being emitted from the Local Group of galaxies..". "Ah, matter creation..." said Arthur C. Clarke immediately (see page 138 of the book below). Of course it is one thing to imagine it, quite another to prove it, but let's see if QI can provide the reason.

References

Arp, Halton, 1998. Seeing Red: redshifts, cosmology and academic science.

FTL, Wide Binaries, Uncertainty, Data & Arp.

So what have I been doing over the past few weeks apart from not updating this blog because I've been trying to decide what I can reveal now that I'm working with experimenters? A lot has happened, so here's a summary of some of it:

I attended the FISW workshop on interstellar travel, in the UK, and gave a talk showing how the propellant-less propulsion you can get from quantised inertia will do three things: 1) make it easier to get into space, 2) make it easier to accelerate towards the speed of light because no heavy fuel needs to be carried and 3) QI may even allow us to outpace light.. My talk, or rather half of it given that the camera was pointing at me and not the slides, can be found here and a paper on it here.

My postdoc and I published a paper on wide binaries. These co-orbiting stars are a little like mini-galaxy rotation problems in that when they are far from each other, they orbit at a speed that should send them zooming off to infinity. Strangely, just like galaxies, they remain bound. The crucial point is that dark matter can't be put in between them to hold them together because that must stay spread out smoothly or the mainstream would be unable to model full galaxies. It turns out that MoND can't model wide binaries either. The point is that only QI can model wide binaries. Experimentum crucis!?

Jaume Gine and I published a paper on an alternative derivation of quantised inertia from the uncertainty principle. I've done a similar derivation before in a paper, and the result was close to QI, but Jaume found that if we assume that the important parameter is not the distance to the horizon, but the width of the horizon, then the result comes out exactly.

I've also had two meetings with DARPA and those seemed to go well, so funding may be OK for awhile (touch wood). Regarding the experiments being done, I cannot tell you any details (because the experimenters have asked me not to), but I can summarise the experimental results so far as not conclusive, but I'm extremely encouraged by them. More conclusive tests will occur in November. It is possible that a couple more groups in the US will collaborate on QI experiments: one on extreme spin and one looking at asymmetric capacitors.

I've been playing around with ideas to develop a full QI cosmology, and reading books by A. Unzicker (Einstein's Lost Key) which discusses the variable speed of light version of GR, which predicts as well as the geometric one, another by Halton Arp (Seeing Red) which talks about intrinsic redshift, and papers by F.W. Kantor who had a model of the cosmos where physics was determined by how much of the cosmos an object could have seen in its lifetime. After a lot of scribbling on paper and getting to the same point where mass seems to equal area, a rough outline has been coalescing. If the cosmic redshift is not caused by recession of the stars from us but by something intrinsic (as suggested by Arp) then this fits better with quantised inertia which ties inertial mass to cosmic age. QI predicts that the inertial mass was lower in the past because objects had not yet had time to see very far off (remember Kantor?) so everybody' cosmos was smaller (although the cosmos itself was not). Therefore, transitioning electrons in atoms in the past likely emitted redshifted (less energetic) photons. So when we look at far stars we see a redshift. QI may also explain some peculiar high redshifts seen by Arp near to galactic axes (new matter?) and redshift quantisation..? For more details of this see my earlier comments here.

All in all, a nice mix of progress in theory, in experiment and in learning to collaborate.

Maths, science, history, unraveling a mystery that all started with the Big Bang. Maybe.
(suggested amended to the Big Bang Theory's TV theme)