The Book Of THoTH

Very well written (By You?)

Supposedly influences are limited to the speed of light and below so how can this be? Did the stars somehow know a thousand, million, or billion years ago that that we were going to try to accelerate our dresser to push it to the other side of the room today and accordingly they acted in just the right way eons ago to make everything work out correctly today? Or did their influence cross the gap between us instantaneously (somehow)?

Roughly, the modern instantaneous action argument goes as follows. In general relativity theory matter "there" tells space "here" how to curve, and space "here" tells matter "here" how to move. (Matter "here" also tells space "there" how to curve.) Thus, in order to talk about any situation in dynamics we must specify the distribution and motion of matter throughout space. (Strictly speaking, we must provide "initial data" on some suitably chosen "three dimensional spacelike hypersurface".) The usual field equations for gravity (Einstein's equations) are not enough, by themselves, to do this it turns out. Because of the finite propagation velocity built into them, we might specify some distribution of matter that subsequently leads to idiotic results. To make sure this doesn't happen, our distribution of matter has to satisfy some additional equations called "constraint" equations. The neat thing about these constraint equations is that, unlike the field equations, they're instantaneous. (Technically, they're "elliptic" rather than "hyperbolic" differential equations.) It's then claimed that inertia is conveyed by the constraint equations -- instantaneously. The use of constraint equations to communicate real physical influences instantaneously is justified by appeal to the instantaneous propagation of stationary electric fields in the Coulomb gauge.

For what it's worth which won't be very much, inertia or the idea of it could be completely wrong.

It's my view that whatever happens (moving objects or simply thinking) is both the result of an action and the cause of others however they be defined. Inertia as a principle in that case could be one of the noticeables of that?

Is jiggling vacuum the origin of mass?

Where mass comes from is one of the deepest mysteries of nature. Now a controversial theory suggests that mass comes from the interaction of matter with the quantum vacuum that pervades the universe.

The theory was previously used to explain inertial mass – the property of matter that resists acceleration – but it has been extended to gravitational mass, which is the property of matter that feels the tug of gravity.

For decades, mainstream opinion has held that something called the Higgs field gives matter its mass, mediated by a particle called the Higgs boson. But no one has yet seen the Higgs boson, despite considerable time and money spent looking for it in particle accelerators.

In the 1990s, Alfonso Rueda of California State University in Long Beach and Bernard Haisch, who was then at the California Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Scotts Valley and is now with ManyOne Networks, suggested that a very different kind of field known as the quantum vacuum might be responsible for mass. This field, which is predicted by quantum theory, is the lowest energy state of space-time and is made of residual electromagnetic vibrations at every point in the universe. It is also called a zeropoint field and is thought to manifest itself as a sea of virtual photons that continually pop into and out of existence.

Rueda and Haisch argued that charged matter particles such as electrons and quarks are unceasingly jiggled around by the zero-point field. If they are at rest, or travelling at a constant speed with respect to the field, then the net effect of all this jiggling is zero: there is no force acting on the particle. But if a particle is accelerating, their calculations in 1994 showed that it would encounter more photons from the quantum vacuum in front than behind it (see Diagram). This would result in a net force pushing against the particle, giving rise to its inertial mass (Physical Review A, vol 49, p 678).

But this work only explained one type of mass. Now the researchers say that the same process can explain gravitational mass. Imagine a massive body that warps the fabric of space-time around it. The object would also warp the zero-point field such that a particle in its vicinity would encounter more photons on the side away from the object than on the nearer side. This would result in a net force towards the massive object, so the particle would feel the tug of gravity. This would be its gravitational mass, or weight (Annalen der Physik, vol 14, p 479).

Rueda and Haisch say this demonstrates the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass – something that Einstein argued for in his theory of general relativity. "In place of having the particle accelerate through the zero-point field, you have the zero-point field accelerating past the particle," says Haisch. "So the generation of weight is the same as the generation of inertial mass."

The idea is far from winning wide acceptance. To begin with, there's a conundrum about the zero-point field that needs to be solved. The total energy contained in the field is staggeringly large – enough to warp space-time and make the universe collapse in a heartbeat. Obviously this is not happening. Also, the pair's work can only account for the mass of charged particles.

Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow of Boston University is dismissive. "This stuff, as Wolfgang Pauli would say, is not even wrong," he says. But physicist Paul Wesson of Stanford University in California says Rueda and Haisch's unorthodox approach shows promise, though he adds that the theory needs to be backed up by experimental evidence. "If Haisch [and Rueda] could come up with a concrete prediction, then that would make people sit up and take notice," he says. "We're all looking for something we can measure."

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Most people think they know what mass is, but they understand only part of the story. For instance, an elephant is clearly bulkier and weighs more than an ant. Even in the absence of gravity, the elephant would have greater mass--it would be harder to push and set in motion. Obviously the elephant is more massive because it is made of many more atoms than the ant is, but what determines the masses of the individual atoms? What about the elementary particles that make up the atoms--what determines their masses? Indeed, why do they even have mass?

We see that the problem of mass has two independent aspects. First, we need to learn how mass arises at all. It turns out mass results from at least three different mechanisms, which I will describe below. A key player in physicists' tentative theories about mass is a new kind of field that permeates all of reality, called the Higgs field. Elementary particle masses are thought to come about from the interaction with the Higgs field. If the Higgs field exists, theory demands that it have an associated particle, the Higgs boson. Using particle accelerators, scientists are now hunting for the Higgs.

The second aspect is that scientists want to know why different species of elementary particles have their specific quantities of mass. Their intrinsic masses span at least 11 orders of magnitude, but we do not yet know why that should be so. For comparison, an elephant and the smallest of ants differ by about 11 orders of magnitude of mass.

What Is Mass?
Isaac newton presented the earliest scientific definition of mass in 1687 in his landmark Principia: "The quantity of matter is the measure of the same, arising from its density and bulk conjointly." That very basic definition was good enough for Newton and other scientists for more than 200 years. They understood that science should proceed first by describing how things work and later by understanding why. In recent years, however, the why of mass has become a research topic in physics. Understanding the meaning and origins of mass will complete and extend the Standard Model of particle physics, the well-established theory that describes the known elementary particles and their interactions. It will also resolve mysteries such as dark matter, which makes up about 25 percent of the universe.

The foundation of our modern understanding of mass is far more intricate than Newton's definition and is based on the Standard Model. At the heart of the Standard Model is a mathematical function called a Lagrangian, which represents how the various particles interact. From that function, by following rules known as relativistic quantum theory, physicists can calculate the behavior of the elementary particles, including how they come together to form compound particles, such as protons. For both the elementary particles and the compound ones, we can then calculate how they will respond to forces, and for a force F, we can write Newton's equation F = ma, which relates the force, the mass and the resulting acceleration. The Lagrangian tells us what to use for m here, and that is what is meant by the mass of the particle.

But mass, as we ordinarily understand it, shows up in more than just F = ma. For example, Einstein's special relativity theory predicts that massless particles in a vacuum travel at the speed of light and that particles with mass travel more slowly, in a way that can be calculated if we know their mass. The laws of gravity predict that gravity acts on mass and energy as well, in a precise manner. The quantity m deduced from the Lagrangian for each particle behaves correctly in all those ways, just as we expect for a given mass.

Fundamental particles have an intrinsic mass known as their rest mass (those with zero rest mass are called massless). For a compound particle, the constituents' rest mass and also their kinetic energy of motion and potential energy of interactions contribute to the particle's total mass. Energy and mass are related, as described by Einstein's famous equation, E = mc2 (energy equals mass times the speed of light squared).

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