Mike McCulloch | How to Get to Proxima Centauri in 15 Years
Foresight Institute’s Space Group
How to Get to Proxima Centauri in 15 Years
Inertial mass has not been understood, and Newton’s first law “Things keep going…” was only ever an observation, without a mechanistic explanation. Quantised inertia (QI) is a new theory that predicts inertia as a damping of acceleration-dependent Unruh radiation by horizons that appear behind an accelerating object causing an excess radiation pressure from in front. QI predicts inertia plus a subtle modification that alters inertia whenever accelerations are low, such that these Unruh waves are long enough to be damped by the informational boundary, cosmic horizon, of the object. When the horizon is the Hubble scale, this predicts galaxy rotation, wide binaries & the orbit of Proxima Centauri without the need for dark matter. The same relation predicts anomalous galaxy rotations seen in the smaller early universe and can be applied at the scale of particles as well.
In the same way, QI predicts that electrons accelerated within a metal cavity such that the peak Unruh wavelength is damped by that cavity, should behave just like the informational cavities described above in that force anomalies will arise. For example, capacitors with highly accelerated electrons undergoing Fowler-Nordheim tunnelling across micron gaps will move towards their anodes. Anomalous thrusts consistent with QI predictions, and up to 6 mN, have been seen in laboratory tests.
This force seems small, but it opens up the galaxy for exploration. A chemical rocket would take 75,000 years to get to the nearest star Proxima Centauri because it has to carry heavy propellant, but a QI Horizon Drive is propellant-less. A probe with 1000 QI capacitors would weigh 8 kg & accelerate at 0.75 m/s2, enabling it to get to the proposed beginning of the Oort Cloud in one year, and to Proxima Centauri in 15 years.
In this talk QI will be explained, the evidence for it presented and the design of an interstellar mission will be given. With foresight, this would be an inspiring and unifying project for a fractured world. QI will also allow cheaper & safer access to space, new sources of energy and more predictive physics.
Speaker Bio: Mike McCulloch gained a BSc in physics in 1991 and a PhD in ocean physics (physical oceanography) in 1995. He worked as an ocean and wave modelling scientist at the UK Met Office between 1998 and 2008, then became a lecturer in geomatics (the mathematics of positioning in space) at the University of Plymouth.
He has published 28 papers proposing and testing a new cosmological model for inertia (quantized inertia, QI) that predicts galaxy rotation without the need for dark matter and shows how to produce propellant-less propulsion by damping the quantum vacuum with horizons. In 2018 he won $1.3M in funding from DARPA to test this. Four independent labs have now seen thrust consistent with QI, and two space tests have been conducted.
He has written two text books about the QI theory: 'Physics from the Edge' (2014) and Quantised Acceleration (2024) and two sci-fi novels about it: 'Falling Up' (2021) and Hacking the Cosmos (2023). He is now an independent researcher and writer.
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Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89448970012