Settle the inertia correlation function

Why the library suggests it

Bernard Haisch, Alfonso Rueda and Harold Puthoff argue that an accelerating object meets a spectrally distorted field, and that a magnetic Lorentz force falls out of that distortion, pointing against the acceleration and growing with it (Inertia as a zero-point-field Lorentz force, 1994). Yefim Levin worked the calculation line by line in Physical Review A and reports that it does not come out as written: the correlation function used implicitly is not the correct non-relativistic limit, the force remembers the entire history of the motion, and with Boyer's exact correlation function the particular component computed comes out zero. Levin says plainly that he hoped to repair the theory and could not, and names the open question that would settle it (Inertia as a zero-point-field force: Critical analysis of the Haisch-Rueda-Puthoff inertia theory, 2009). Meanwhile two other routes reach an inertial mass from vacuum fluctuations and agree with each other to a factor of about 1.2 — one from the uncertainty principle, one from a horizon-shaded imbalance (Modeling inertia through the interaction with quantum fluctuations, 2021). The instrument that makes this experimental is the switched vacuum detector: electro-optic sampling with a probe pulse shorter than one field cycle behaves as an Unruh-DeWitt detector, and switched that fast it registers real photons out of the vacuum (Realizing a rapidly switched Unruh-DeWitt detector through electro-optic sampling of the electromagnetic vacuum, 2022). The theoretical groundwork for what an accelerated detector should see is Some theoretical aspects of observation of acceleration induced thermality (2025).

The experiment or build

Use the electro-optic sampler as the detector and give it a controlled effective acceleration — the switching itself supplies one, and the crossover between genuine detector behaviour and ordinary squeezing has already been located in the literature. Measure the two-point correlation of the sampled field in the switched frame and compare it directly against the two candidate correlation functions. The settling measurement is the measured vacuum field correlation function in an accelerated or rapidly switched frame, plotted against the two published candidates, with the crossover frequency stated. Whichever way it comes out, a foundational forty-year argument acquires a laboratory answer, which is a better outcome than either side winning by assertion.