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

Wednesday 7 May 2014

MiHsC experiment: cold or not?


Over the past few years I have been liaising with someone in the US who is now setting up an experiment to test MiHsC. The plan is to spin a motor at 1 million rpm near to a shielded sensitive balance and see if the increased local acceleration of the disc increases the inertial mass of the test mass on the balance and reduces its sensitivity to the Earth's gravity as predicted by MiHsC. This would appear as a anomalous loss of weight. MiHsC effects appear when the local accelerations change, and to make sure they do, I assumed in some of my previous papers that it was necessary to cool things down first and eliminate the large thermal accelerations (eg: McCulloch, 2011) so that when you accelerate something like a disc the measurable 'change' in acceleration causes observable phenomenon.

Having said that, the first experiment is going to be done warm because cryostats are expensive, and also I'm not 100 percent sure about the cooling. It's puzzling. For example the experiment of Tajmar et al. (2009), where they accelerated a ring and saw anomalous accelerations (that MiHsC predicts well) needed temperatures below 15 Kelvin. The experiment of Podkletnov (MiHsC predicts the part of it that can be quantified) needed temperatures below 70 Kelvin. On the other hand, when MiHsC works to predict galaxy rotation (very well) it is responding to the different large-scale orbital acceleration of stars, ignoring that fact that they are all spinning and have huge thermal accelerations. There was also the experiment of Hayasaka (1997) who dropped a (room temperature) gyroscope and found it fell more slowly, in line with MiHsC, when it was spinning. Admittedly this last experiment could have been wrong, and it only worked for right rotations which is another puzzle that I've been rolling my eyes at, but it's best for sanity to only think about one impossibility at a time!

The best thing to do when unsure about things is to simply ask nature for directions and that is what we are going to do with this experiment.

References:

Hayasaka, H., H. Tanaka and T. Hashida,1997. Spec. in Science and Tech., 20, 173-181.
McCulloch, M.E., 2011. The Tajmar effect from quantised inertia. EPL, 95, 39002.
Podkletnov, E.E., R. Nieminen, 1992.   Physica C, 203, 441-444.
Tajmar, M., F. Plesescu, and B. Seifert, 2009.  J. Phys. Conf. Ser., 150, 032101.

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