Connectivity and the Origin of Inertia

The paper pursues two aims. First, to revisit the classical electromagnetic mass theory and develop it further by making use of a corollary of general relativity - that the propagation of light in non-inertial reference frames is anisotropic. Second, to show that the same type of acceleration-dependent self-interaction effects that give rise to the inertia and mass of the classical electron appear in quantum field theory as well when the general relativistic frequency shift o...

Current approaches to the problem of inertia attempt to explain the inertial properties of matter by expressing the inertial mass appearing in Newton's second law of motion in terms of some other more fundamental interaction. One increasingly popular approach explains inertial and gravitational forces as drag forces arising due to quantum vacuum zero-point phenomena. General relativity, however, suggests that gravitational and inertial forces are manifestations of space-time ...

We report on the progress of a NASA-funded study being carried out at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto and the California State University in Long Beach to investigate the proposed link between the zero-point field of the quantum vacuum and inertia. It is well known that an accelerating observer will experience a bath of radiation resulting from the quantum vacuum which mimics that of a heat bath, the so-called Davies-Unruh effect. We have further a...

In order to explain the origin of inertia and the nature of the inertial rest mass, we must first accept that gravity is described by a gravitomagnetic theory just like the electromagnetic theory with the gravitational mass as a Lorentz invariant, and secondly the fundamental idea of the relativity of all kinds of motion. By doing this we can prove that: 1. The external inertial forces, felt by an accelerating body, are inductive effects of the entire Universe while the int...

At the beginning of the 20th century the classical electron theory (or, perhaps more appropriately, the classical electromagnetic mass theory) - the first physical theory that dared ask the question of what inertia and mass were - was gaining momentum and there were hopes that physics would be finally able to explain their origin. It is argued in this paper that if that promising research path had not been inexplicably abandoned after the advent of relativity and quantum mech...

It was proposed by Haisch, Rueda and Puthoff (Phys. Rev. A, 49, 678, 1994) that the inertia of matter could be interpreted at least in part as a reaction force originating in interactions between the electromagnetic zero-point field (ZPF) and the elementary charged consitutents (quarks and electrons) of matter. Within the limited context of that analysis, it appeared that Newton's equation of motion, f=ma, could be inferred from Maxwell's equations as applied to the ZPF, i.e....

The purpose of the present work is to trace parallels between the known inertia forces in fluid dynamics with the inertia forces in electromagnetism that are known to induce resistance forces on masses both due to acceleration and at constant velocity. It is shown that the force exerted on a particle by an ideal fluid produces two effects: i) resistance to acceleration and, ii) an increase of mass with velocity. These resistance forces arise due to the fluid dragged by the pa...

Based on the Generalized Principle of Inertia, which states that: \emph{An inanimate object moves freely, that is, with zero acceleration, in its own spacetime, whose geometry is determined by all of the forces affecting it,} we geometrize Newtonian dynamics for any conservative force. For an object moving in a spherically symmetric force field, using a variational principle, conservation of angular momentum and a classical limit, we construct a metric with respect to which t...

A goal of physics is to understand the greatest possible breadth of natural phenomena in terms of the most economical set of basic concepts. However, as the understanding of physics has developed historically, its pedagogy and language have not kept pace. This gap handicaps the student and the practitioner, making it harder to learn and apply ideas that are `well understood', and doubtless making it more difficult to see past those ideas to new discoveries. Energy, momentum, ...

We provide a quantum field theoretic derivation of Einstein's Weak Equivalence Principle of general relativity using a new quantum gravity theory proposed by the authors called Electro-Magnetic Quantum Gravity or EMQG (ref. 1). EMQG is based on a new theory of inertia (ref. 5) proposed by R. Haisch, A. Rueda, and H. Puthoff (which we modified and called Quantum Inertia). Quantum Inertia states that classical Newtonian Inertia is a property of matter due to the strictly local ...