Book Review: Quantised Accelerations by Mike McCulloch

A week ago, I came across this meme on the internet.

The history of physics.
Aristotle said a bunch of stuff that was wrong. Galileo and Newton fixed things up. Then Einstein broke everything again. Now, we’ve basically got it all worked out, except for small stuff, big stuff, hot stuff, cold stuff, fast stuff, heavy stuff, dark stuff, turbulence, and the concept of time.

Then Dr Mike McCulloch sent me a copy of his new book ‘Quantised Accelerations’ to review, and having read it, the meme needs important updates. This paradigm busting book has been seven years in the pipeline, and it really does deliver a reformulation and reinvigoration of physics as a whole. Not just one specialised corner, but all dynamics. Correcting Newtonian dynamics is a big deal!

Dr McCulloch’s Quantised Inertia theory demonstrates that the stars we thought were going round the edge of galaxies faster than they should be, aren’t, and the dark matter which we thought was needed to keep them gravitationally bound, isn’t. It turns out that very slowly accelerating stars have less inertia, which means the visible matter in galaxies is sufficient to keep them bound at the velocity they’re observed to be moving. In the QI theory, inertia isn’t an attribute intrinsic to objects, as Newton thought. Instead, it’s due to the interaction of the objects acceleration rate, Unruh radiation moving at the speed of light and the differential in the distances to the horizons fore and aft of the accelerating object.

Newton’s Force = Mass x Acceleration, F=ma gets a tiny modification which has no effect at terrestrial accelerations, but affects the inertial mass of the many very slowly accelerating objects out there in the universe we’ve only recently become able to measure accurately. The principle QI equation looks like this:

ħ is the reduced Planck constant, c is the speed of light, l_P is the Planck length and Θ is the diameter of the observable universe.

Notice that this equation contains no ‘tuned variable’. It is what it is. It gets one chance to get whatever it’s trying to do right, and it does.

The same elegantly simple equation can also be applied to predict the motion of wide binary pairs, star clusters, oddities such as Hoag’s object, and crucially, the Alpha Centauri system, which is well observed, nearby, and reachable within a couple of decades using one of QI’s amazing practical applications; propellantless thrust. More on that later, but since Dr Mike has also applied his QI principles to derive the gravitational constant from the same universal attributes, we should summarize where we’ve got so far:

By dealing with anomalously fast stuff (stars), we’ve got rid of the unpleasantly unobservable dark stuff (DM), while eliminating the constant for heavy stuff (G), by relating the fastest stuff (c) to the biggest stuff (Universal diameter). Alongside this principle theme, in the book, Mike McCulloch outlines around 50 other anomalous problems our current physics can’t solve. While showing how his QI theory predicts many of them, he covers small stuff, such as nanometre scale cavities which could theoretically form self thrusting surfaces or ‘floating bricks’. Cold stuff, the possibility of fusion occurring without the need for huge tokamaks, but at the 25,900K temperature QI predicts the 28nm crack in a palladium bar to reach while fusing deuterons. Hot stuff!

On the subject of big cold stuff and turbulence or resonance, QI predicts the maximum wavelength of the Unruh radiation in the early universe, and Dr Mike attempts to relate subharmonics of that wavelength (λn = λ0, λ0/2, λ0/3, λ0/4…) to the peaks in the Cosmic Microwave Background. This isn’t very successful, but I think our research into resonant ratios in planetary systems here at Tallbloke’s Talkshop can help.

QI theory successfully predicts the magnitude of the anomalous thrust observed in capacitors from fundamental theory. This ‘Biefield-Brown’ effect has been observed since the 1920s although no-one knew why it occurred, and it has now been extensively tested in multiple laboratories around the world. The empirical measurements have been collected and collated by Dr Mike in a submitted paper which shows that the results agree well with QI theoretical predictions. He dubs his own version the ‘Horizon drive’. Sadly, a space test attempted last year failed when the cubesat carrying the experiment lost power before the thruster could be tested, but the companies involved plan to try again soon.

A full chapter of ‘Quantised Accelerations’ is devoted to the design and spaceflight plan for a space-probe using stacked QI Horizon drives to reach Proxima Centauri in a calculated flight time of 15 years. Not bad, considering current technology would take 50,000 years to get there. Thrust developed by the 1.7W power input would be 6N. It doesn’t sound much, but since the craft needs no heavy propellant, it’s enough to accelerate to a velocity of half-lightspeed over the course of a few years.

Throughout ‘Quantised Accelerations’, Mike McCulloch emphasises the value of sticking to the empirical scientific method, such as Ernst Mach’s insistence on the measurability of quantities. QI is compatible with special relativity, but general relativity is made obsolete. In any case, QI successfully predicts the bending of light passing stars with simple algebra and without the need for tensor calculus or non-observable bent space. The reason QI calculations can be so elegantly simple and self contained, is that it treats motion as relative to the objects directly involved, and doesn’t need a tuneable external field variable as it’s nearest competitor theory MoND does.

The final item on our meme’s bucket list of unsolved physics problems is the concept of time. In his introduction to QI in chapter 6.1, Dr Mike adopts a proto-Cartesian process to understand the building blocks of the cosmos from first principles, ‘I blink, therefore I am’. At the quantum level, in the simplest possible systems, time can only be counted by the occurrence of discrete events. When nothing happens, time is ‘skipped’. Time is an emergent phenomenon, which only becomes a more regular metric as the population of perceiving entities increases.

I certainly hope the number of perceiving entities deciding to be curious about this groundbreaking new physics increases, because following a period of navel gazing stagnation in a physics enmeshed in its own computer aided complexity, we need fresh ideas. Mike McCulloch is asking for help to discover and develop the lifetimes worth of novel and applicable results that can flow from QI.

Quantised Accelerations can be pre-ordered here for July 15th delivery.