Inertia Is an Electromagnetic Interaction?

Arbitrageur
Do you see the problem with pointing to a paper that uses the equivalence principle for corroboration, while saying the equivalence principle is wrong?

I don't know whether the following sheds any light, or not. It's from Tom Valone's website and the title is "Understanding Zero Point Energy." In it he refers to the same paper:

. . . Puthoff explains that the resistance to acceleration defines the inertia of matter and it appears to be an electromagnetic resistance. To summarize: the inertia effect is a distortion at high frequencies whereas, the gravity effect has been shown to be low frequency effect, according to the Puthoff theory.

micpsi
Inertial mass cannot be due to a Lorenz coupling to the zero-point electromagnetic field because this would mean that all electrically uncharged particles, which would not couple to any electromagnetic field, would be massless, whereas we know that the well-established phenomenon of neutrino oscillations implies that neutrinos have a small mass, not a zero mass, which those formulating this theory accepted when they proposed it.

Well, there is the experimental fact that the mass of the neutrinos is much, much less than all other particles. And has the inertial mass of neutrinos ever been experimentally bounded above zero? (you can't assume equivalence principle as an axiom in this).

Obviously this theory is incomplete, but suppose it explained 98%-99.9% of the inertial mass?

Inertial mass is due to the coupling of the particle to the Higgs field, which fills all space as a Type 2 superconductor, a non-abelian version of the Meissner Effect expelling colour SU(3) flux from the Nielson-Oleson vortices in the Higgs superfluid with quark monopoles at their endpoints, confining them permanently as bound states of three quarks or as quark-antiquark pairs.

The mechanism proposed years ago by Puthoff ("Owl"), Haisch, etc has been overtaken by the discovery at CERN of what is likely to be the Higgs boson. Zero-point energy is a spent force, as far as explaining inertial mass is concerned, and few physicists believe this theory.

How does discovery of the Higgs field (I think CERN's results are authentic) rule out electromagnetic explanations for most of the inertial mass?

And in some way isn't interaction with Higgs field a 'zero-point' collective effect as well?

originally posted by: Mary Rose
Tom Valone, author of Zero Point Energy, The Fuel of the Future, testified about technology at the recent Citizen Hearing on Disclosure.

His presentation is now available on YouTube.

The part about the paper "Inertia as a zero-point-field Lorentz force" begins at 7:46:

a reply to: Mary Rose

There is an article at MIT Technology Review from 2010 entitled "New Quantum Theory Separates Gravitational and Inertial Mass":

The equivalence principle is one of the corner stones of general relativity. Now physicists have used quantum mechanics to show how it fails.

. . . the extraordinary work of Endre Kajari at the University of Ulm in Germany and a few buddies. They show how it is possible to create situations in the quantum world in which the effects of inertial and gravitational mass must be different. In fact, they show that these differences can be arbitrarily large.

Their thinking begins by pointing out the important distinction between kinematics, which is concerned purely with motion not how it arises, and dynamics which focuses on the origin of motion. In the classical world, this has no bearing on the effects of inertial and gravitational mass.

www.technologyreview.com...

From Cornell University Library:

Inertial and gravitational mass in quantum mechanics
E. Kajari, N.L. Harshman, E.M. Rasel, S. Stenholm, G. Süßmann, W.P. Schleich

. . . We show that in complete agreement with classical mechanics, the dynamics of any quantum mechanical wave packet in a linear gravitational potential involves the gravitational and the inertial mass only as their ratio. In contrast, the spatial modulation of the corresponding energy wave function is determined by the third root of the product of the two masses. Moreover, the discrete energy spectrum of a particle constrained in its motion by a linear gravitational potential and an infinitely steep wall depends on the inertial as well as the gravitational mass with different fractional powers. This feature might open a new avenue in quantum tests of the universality of free fall.

arxiv.org...

Originally posted by Arbitrageur

Do you see the problem with pointing to a paper that uses the equivalence principle for corroboration, while saying the equivalence principle is wrong?

Does the following passage from "BEYOND E=mc2 - A first glimpse of a postmodern physics, in which mass, inertia and gravity arise from underlying electromagnetic processes" by Bernard Haisch, Alfonso Rueda & H.E. Puthoff shed light on the apparent contradiction?

Our work suggests that the conventional Newtonian idea of mass must be boldly reinterpreted. If we are correct, physical theory need no longer suppose that there is something called mass having an innate property, inertia, that resists acceleration; what is really happening, instead, is that an electromagnetic force acts on the charge inside matter to create the effect of inertia. Indeed, it appears that the more parsimonious interpretation is not even that there is charge lurking "inside matter," but that there is only charge. The presence of charge and its interaction with the ZPF creates the forces we all experience and attribute to the existence of matter. Our interpretation would apply even to an electrically neutral particle such as the neutron, because the neutron, at the most fundamental level, is thought to be made up of smaller particles called quarks, which do carry electric charge.

We have had little to say so far about the second key property for the concept of mass, the gravitation to which matter gives rise. But experimental evidence shows that an object's inertial mass, or its resistance to acceleration, is equivalent to the object's gravitational mass, or its mass in a gravitational field. Einstein's general theory of relativity is based on the assumption that inertial and gravitational mass are equivalent and indistinguishable-the so-called principle of equivalence. Hence it stands to reason that if the ZPF gives rise to the phenomenon of inertia, it must also in some way generate the effect of gravity. This audacious idea was proposed as early as 1968 by the Russian physicist and dissident Andrei D. Sakharov, but he never fully developed the concept into a scientific theory.

In 1989 the idea was taken up by one of us (Puthoff) and formulated within the framework of stochastic electrodynamics into a preliminary but quantifiable, nonrelativistic representation of Newtonian gravitation. The underlying principle is remarkably intuitive. If a charged particle is subjected to ZPF interactions, it will be forced to fluctuate in response to the random jostlings of the electromagnetic waves of the ZPF. Moreover, since the ZPF is all-pervasive, charged particles everywhere in the universe will be forced to fluctuate. Now a basic result from classical electrodynamics is that a fluctuating electric charge emits an electromagnetic radiation field. The result is that all charges in the universe will emit secondary electromagnetic fields in response to their interactions with the primary field, the ZPF.

The secondary electromagnetic fields turn out to have a remarkable property. Between any two particles they give rise to an attractive force. The force is much weaker than the ordinary attractive or repulsive forces between two stationary electric charges, and it is always attractive, whether the charges are positive or negative. The result is that the secondary fields give rise to an attractive force we propose may be identified with gravity.

It is important to note that the fluctuations are relativistic — that is, the charges move at velocities at or close to the speed of light. The energy associated with the fluctuations — which for historical reasons is given the German name zitterbewegung, or trembling movement — is interpreted as the energy equivalent of gravitational rest mass. Since the gravitational force is caused by the trembling motion, there is no need to speak any longer of a gravitational mass as the source of gravitation. The source of gravitation is the driven motion of a charge, not the attractive power of the thing physicists are used to thinking of as mass. To interpret Einstein's equation E=mc2, we would say that mass is not equivalent to energy. Mass is energy.

calphysics.org...

a reply to: ConnectDots

There's some pretty good criticism of Puthoff's idea by John Woodward.

One huge question is how it works for neutrons and protons. The EM induced inertia in P's theory is related to the absolute value of the charge. Well, the sum of the absolute value of the charges in protons and neutrons are significantly different, and yet their rest masses and inertia are almost the same.

And of course enormously larger than the electron + positron which have total charge not that much different.

And then, why does the muon have so much larger mass than an electron? It has the same charge as an electron and is elementary.

And oh yeah, experimental results past 1989 --- looks like neutrinos have a small rest mass, but they're elementary and totally uncharged. Puthoff's theory predicts of course zero for that case.

It's a cute idea, and electromagnetic ZPE effects may be potentially observable but I doubt it solves the mass problem or the equivalence problem.

Mass is a really strange thing. All other physics works in its own sector of forces & quantum numbers: e&m on EM fields and charges, strong force on color (gluons) & quarks, weak on its own stuff.

But mass somehow sums up everything, sums up electromagnetic self interaction plus quark color plus weak plus whatever. Like it's adding up terms which shouldn't be in the same units. We just call them all 'mass' but in their core, they're totally different and the proportionality coefficient is just pulled out of the, uh, lower ether orfice. It's a huge WTF?

And it still doesn't explain general relativity & space curvature---clearly zero rest mass photons (we can agree on that!) are influenced by gravitation.

originally posted by: mbkennel
a reply to: ConnectDots

There's some pretty good criticism of Puthoff's idea by John Woodward.

John Woodward not James Woodward?

I see a paper by Tom Valone "Electrokinetics as a Propellantless Propulsion Source" discussing the work of Dr. James Woodward:

www.sciencedirect.com...

a reply to: ConnectDots

He meant james woodward.

Here is a paper "What Is the Cause of Inertia?" by James F. Woodward and Thomas Mahood, California State University. Regarding "Inertia as a zero-point-field Lorentz force":

www.otherhand.org...

Another excerpt:

www.otherhand.org...

And this:

www.otherhand.org...

a reply to: BASSPLYR

Indeed I did. Apologies.

I agree with Woodward's arguments, but it still remains the totally open question about the mechanistic origin of gravity. I.e. the problem is not solved---Puthoff thought he might have found a key in explaining inertial type of things by virtue of a much more sane interaction, E&M.


I now ask the crowd a question: are we absolutely sure, from experimental data, that leptons gravitate? Would we be able to tell if the inertial and gravitational masses of leptons were different?

I see from the Wikipedia article "Equivalence principle" that there are three forms of it: weak (Galilean), Einsteinian, and strong. So, maybe the contradiction between Valone's presentation and the paper he cites has something to do with that.

Also from the article:

Challenges to the equivalence principle

One challenge to the equivalence principle is the Brans–Dicke theory. Self-creation cosmology is a modification of the Brans–Dicke theory. The Fredkin Finite Nature Hypothesis is an even more radical challenge to the equivalence principle and has even fewer supporters.

In August 2010, researchers from the School of Physics, University of New South Wales, Australia; the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia; and the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, United Kingdom; published the paper "Evidence for spatial variation of the fine structure constant", whose tentative conclusion is that, "qualitatively, [the] results suggest a violation of the Einstein Equivalence Principle, and could infer a very large or infinite universe, within which our 'local' Hubble volume represents a tiny fraction."[37]

Explanations of the equivalence principle

Dutch physicist and string theorist Erik Verlinde has generated a self-contained, logical derivation of the equivalence principle based on the starting assumption of a holographic universe. Given this situation, gravity would not be a true fundamental force as is currently thought but instead an "emergent property" related to entropy. Verlinde's entropic gravity theory apparently leads naturally to the correct observed strength of dark energy; previous failures to explain its incredibly small magnitude have been called by such people as cosmologist Michael Turner (who is credited as having coined the term "dark energy") as "the greatest embarrassment in the history of theoretical physics".[38] However, it should be noted that these ideas are far from settled and still very controversial.

en.wikipedia.org...

The presentation in question for this thread was before the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure. Testimony there indicated that the knowledge of all of this is known; it's just kept secret. What a pity.