At the end of the 19th Century, the story goes there was quite a lot of complacency in the physics field – most things were fairly-well understood, only a few loose ends to be tied up. Of course, one of those troubling little anomalies was the precession of Mercury, which led to the General Theory of Relativity; another was Black Body Radiation, which led to Quantum Theory.
Those major advances led to a different problem: both theories worked very well in their intended realms, but they were completely incompatible. A further century of work by some of humanity’s brightest minds has failed to unite them into a Theory of Everything.
Worse, trying to fit increasingly-precise observations into those two theories has involved us in ever-larger mental gymnastics. The universe began with the spontaneous creation of all its matter & energy in a tiny infinitely dense spot – but such spontaneous creation has never happened again. (Why not?). Then an unknown force miraculously caused that spot to expand (into what?) faster than the speed of light … and then that inflation force conveniently went away. The universe created equal amounts of anti-matter and normal matter … but the anti-particles conveniently somehow exited stage left. Then to make observations fit the theory, we had to postulate an unknown Dark Matter which distributes itself in a rather particular way, along with yet another inexplicable force, Dark Energy, to fit the apparent acceleration of the universe’s expansion. It seems we are getting close to having to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
An alternative possible explanation is that perhaps our current theories are incomplete – rather as Kepler’s successful laws of planetary motion and Newton’s law of universal gravitation were eventually replaced.
Into these strained circumstances steps Michael Edward McCulloch with his book “Quantised Accelerations: From Anomalies to New Physics”, ISBN 979-8-9902823-1-5, 216 pages (2024). In his videos, McCulloch comes across as a somewhat diffident Englishman, but in his writing he appears to be having a merry old time.
McCulloch is a proponent of the old-fashioned view that physics should start with observations and then devise theories which fit those facts. He has compiled a list of 54 anomalies (Count them! Fifty four!) which are not properly explained by current physical theories. To be fair, some of those anomalies don’t seem that significant; but then the precession of Mercury seemed fairly minor too.
McCullough’s hypothesis is that a number of these anomalies might be explained by a better understanding of the Casimir Effect – the observed force between supposedly-inert metal plates in a vacuum. In this book, he does not really try to flesh out his hypothesis, instead directing the reader to a list of 167 technical references. But whether or not his hypothesis on “Quantized Accelerations” eventually pans out, he makes a good case that there are potentially a lot of loose ends in 21st Century physics. It is a thought-provoking book – well worth reading.