I’ve been in the ‘New Physics’ arena for 17 years now, and things keep getting weirder. When I started out in 2006, peer reviewers of my early papers were of the opinion that they didn’t exactly believe QI but it was more likely than dark matter, they could not find anything logically wrong and the theory agreed with the data, so that was that. In other words, they put logic and facts before mere opinion. Today, an article appeared on Universe Today (see below from the Wayback Machine) reporting two factual events that I’ve had to keep quiet about for months due to an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agree ..read more

The Bullet cluster has been a poster child for the dark side for years. The cluster is shown below. The pink areas show the lit matter that can be seen through a telescope, ie: that actually exists. The idea is that the pink 'bullet' on the right has smashed through the pink 'target' on the left and is still moving rightwards. Using the stars behind the cluster and distortions in them, it is possible to find out the amount of light bending (lensing) going on in the field of view and therefore, they assume, the invisible mass that is there. This is shown by the blue areas. This is their dark ..read more

The sound of an object moving away from you will shift to a lower frequency as the waves from your point of view are spread out. This is the Doppler effect and applies to light waves as well. Edwin Hubble noticed that the light from distant galaxies was red shifted, that is, the wavelength of the light we received from them was longer, implying in a similar way that the galaxies were moving away and that the further ones were moving away faster. This was taken to mean that all the galaxies were moving away from a common centre as if there has been a Big Bang 13.6 billion years in the past. The ..read more

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 cons ..read more

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 i ..read more

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 plo ..read more

For the past five months my Chief Engineer (Richard Arundal) and myself have been busy in the lab attempting to prove that one can extract propellant-less thrust from a capacitor by using quantised inertia. QI thrust is implied theoretically (McCulloch, 2013, 2017), but a capacitor approach was first suggested and tested by Becker and Bhatt (2018) who had read my paper on thrust and dielectrics (2017) and did some lab tests in liaison with me. Their work has been seconded by Mansell/IVO Ltd. Curious to test this approach I used the last remaining DARPA money to set up a lab at Plymouth Unive ..read more

Starting in mid-June, Richard Arundal and I have completed 45 experiments, charging up capacitors 4x4 cm in area with either kapton or Polyethylene dielectrics between the plates. We have been carefully eliminating pesky artifacts, through trial and error, along with the appropriate amount of engineering, er, 'jargon', and taking readings with increasing accuracy. Here I summarise the cleanest data we have so far. The plot below shows the change in thrust up the y axis (a positive value is always a thrust towards the capacitor's anode) for eight runs. As we increase the voltage and move along ..read more

NOTE: Only act upon this if you have experience with high voltages. Here is a practical way to (maybe) see QI thrust at home. I've been musing about using Unruh radiation and QI for thrust for 17 years in my theoretical papers (McCulloch, 2008, 2013) but the capacitor method was proposed by Frank Becker and Ankur Bhatt (2018) and has since been improved by several people, many of whom wish to remain anonymous, but they especially include my post-doc & my research assistant Richard Arundal. Here I describe the thruster we are testing at Plymouth University. 1. The QI Sail / Horizon Drive. A ..read more

The cosmos, empty space, is known to be full of virtual particles. They appear in pairs to conserve momentum and then recombine after a short while. In 1976 Hawking showed that black hole event horizons can separate these pairs by trapping the one on the wrong side of the horizon. The star-crossed lovers are unable to recombine, so one of them becomes real and is emitted as Hawking radiation. This means that whereas black holes can hoover up information-full objects such as flowers and manuscripts (see below left), they can only emit thermal, random, Hawking radiation (see below right). This m ..read more