Ron Unz, possibly you spend little time on theoretical physics these days, but if you’re still interested, you might like to have a look at the Twitter feed of @memcculloch. An academic at the University of Plymouth, UK, Mike McCulloch has pioneered the theory of Quantised Inertia (QI) since about 2006, and is currently putting his theory to the test with $1.3 million of DARPA funding.

The potential is that QI will enable us to construct propellantless spacecraft which can reach a significant fraction of the speed of light and allow access to other stars within a lifetime. It may also allow safe, very-low-cost energy here on Earth.

I should mention that I’m unable to judge QI on its scientific merits due to lack of scientific training, but the Chinese government as well as DARPA have funded some tests in the last few years, and I expect you will be able to form an educated opinion on it. As best as I can understand, QI is perhaps a quantisation of gravity, and I recall that Mike has speculated on the universe being ultimately reducible to information.

Some time in the last decade, Mike has been partially ostracised from the Physics community, and quietly banned from putting new papers on the Physics arXiv for no obvious reason. A large amount of money and resources have been ploughed into the search for dark matter in recent decades without success, based on the belief that the General Theory of Relativity MUST be correct despite it failing to predict galaxy rotation speeds or the orbits of wide-binary star systems or the orbits of galactic globular clusters.

Mike uses Special Relativity in QI, but it appears that Mike is seen as a dark matter heretic by the theoretical physics establishment, as QI predicts all those celestial movements without the need for dark matter (and dark matter theories, which are based on General Relativity, cannot be applied to wide-binary star systems and galactic globular clusters anyway). It would be embarrassing for the theoretical physics establishment and a big loss or at least a big reallocation of funding if dark matter theories were shown to be incorrect.

More information:-

A 15-minute, TedX presentation by Mike outlining QI theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnNKC82wUmY

Mike’s blog is at https://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.com.

A couple of Mike’s papers, which he has recommended, are:
1) “Inertia from an asymmetric Casimir effect” – https://arxiv.org/abs/1302.2775
2) https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mike-Mcculloch/publication/263029182_A_Toy_Cosmology_Using_a_Hubble-Scale_Casimir_Effect/links/55fc735608aeba1d9f400a91/A-Toy-Cosmology-Using-a-Hubble-Scale-Casimir-Effect.pdf

One of Mike’s two books, “Physics from the Edge”: https://www.amazon.com/Physics-Edge-Cosmological-Model-Inertia/dp/9814596256/

A March 2022, Yahoo news story on a recent, commercial prototype of a QI satellite ‘thruster’ (actually there is no thrust because there’s no propellant): https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ivo-ltd-introduces-world-first-100000962.html