Inertia as a zero-point-field Lorentz force
Bernard Haisch · Alfonso Rueda · Harold E. Puthoff
Summary and citation · read the original at the source
In one page
Bernard Haisch, Alfonso Rueda and Hal Puthoff take the most ordinary equation in physics — force equals mass times acceleration — and ask where the resistance in it actually comes from. Their proposal is that matter is built from charged subelementary pieces, which they call partons, bound like tiny Planck oscillators, and that these are shaken continuously by the electromagnetic zero-point field that fills the vacuum. Sit still and the shaking averages out to nothing. Accelerate, and the field you meet is no longer symmetric: it is spectrally distorted, and out of that distortion the authors find a magnetic Lorentz force nobody had gone looking for, pointing against the acceleration and growing with it. Add the partons up and you get a macroscopic resistance to being accelerated. That, they argue, is inertia — something the vacuum does to matter rather than a property matter simply has. The paper closes with a physically rigorous form of Mach's principle.
Why it matters hereThis is the paper chapter 3 is built on: it makes inertia an effect of the field rather than an intrinsic property of matter, and that single move is what lets chapter 8 treat inertial mass as a quantity a craft could act on rather than a fixed toll it must pay.
What it claims
01If ordinary matter is made of charged subelementary entities — partons — bound as Planck oscillators, then a previously uninvestigated Lorentz force, specifically its magnetic component, arises in any accelerated reference frame out of the interaction of those partons with the vacuum electromagnetic zero-point field.Abstract
Published and peer-reviewed02That force is directed against the acceleration and, summed over the partons of a body, appears as a macroscopic opposition to acceleration whose properties match those of inertia.Abstract; derivation of the reaction force
Published and peer-reviewed03Inertia can therefore be interpreted as an electromagnetic resistance arising from the known spectral distortion of the zero-point field in accelerated frames, rather than as an intrinsic property of matter.Abstract; concluding discussion
Published and peer-reviewed04Although partons are asymptotically free at high frequencies, a sufficiently large bare mass lets them interact with the zero-point field all the way up to the Planck frequency, which is what makes the effect large enough to be inertia.Abstract; parton model section
Published and peer-reviewed05The result amounts to a physically rigorous version of Mach's principle: the resistance a body offers to acceleration is set by its interaction with a universal field rather than by the body alone.Abstract; concluding discussion
What to watch06The same treatment gives preliminary support for zero-point-field models of gravitation and for the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass, which the authors developed further in later NASA-funded work.Abstract; final section
What to watch
The way in
https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevA.49.678Published by the American Physical Society; the record is indexed at OSTI and PubMed, and the authors' later NASA-funded development of the theory is on arXiv.
How to cite it
Bernard Haisch, Alfonso Rueda, Harold E. Puthoff (1994) Inertia as a zero-point-field Lorentz force. doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.49.678
Where it sits in the curriculum
Inertia and gravity from the vacuumWhat the vacuum isInertial mass reduction and transmedium craft