I've suggested (& published in 21 journal papers) a new theory called quantised inertia (or MiHsC) that assumes that inertia is caused by horizons damping quantum fields. It predicts galaxy rotation & lab thrusts without any dark stuff or adjustment. My University webpage is here, I've written a book called Physics from the Edge and I'm on twitter as @memcculloch. Most of my content is at patreon now: here

Friday 21 February 2014

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.

2 comments:

PeterVermont said...

Inward Hawking radiation is intriguing. I am interested in plasma cosmology but have wondered how charge separation can be maintained over time. Could the hawking radiation be a renewable of source of randomly separated charges?

In your toy cosmos it would seem that the surface area to volume ratio is continuously decreasing so while the universe becomes larger its energy per unit space is decreasing. What observation would show that the average energy per unit volume has decreased over time?

Mike McCulloch said...

Charge seperation: a spinning object (high acceleration, a) would have a closer Rindler horizon (distance=c^2/a) which, according to MiHsC, would release a lot of energy from the vacuum. The thermal energy would be something like E>=kT=0.2*hc/2T (T=diameter of the Rindler sphere).

Regarding evidence of the past energy per unit space: MiHsC predicts that earlier galaxies (with higher red shift) should have a faster spin for less mass (they should seem dark, but actually in MiHsC it is the inertial mass of their stars that is less). Also the smaller cosmos is predicted to be hotter (see Eq. above) and MiHsC predicts inflation, since the minimum acceleration is greater in a smaller cosmos.