Abstract
Today we have a solid, if incomplete, physical picture of how inertia is created in the standard model. We know that most of the visible baryonic ‘mass’ in the Universe is due to gluonic back-reaction on accelerated quarks, the latter of which attribute their own inertia to a coupling with the Higgs field – a process that elegantly and self-consistently also assigns inertia to several other particles. But we have never had a physically viable explanation for the origin of rest-mass energy, in spite of many attempts at understanding it towards the end of the nineteenth century, culminating with Einstein’s own landmark contribution in his Annus Mirabilis. Here, we introduce to this discussion some of the insights we have garnered from the latest cosmological observations and theoretical modeling to calculate our gravitational binding energy with that portion of the Universe to which we are causally connected, and demonstrate that this energy is indeed equal to mc^2 when the inertia m is viewed as a surrogate for gravitational mass.
Highlights
Today we take it for granted that a particle with inertia, mi, carries an irreducible amount of energy – even when at rest with respect to the observer – given by Einstein’s famous formula, E = mic2
We would see an equivalence between inertia and the electric charge, perhaps leading us to propose an alternative equivalence principle based on the notion that we could not distinguish between charges accelerated in an electromagnetic field and the analogous situation of charges being viewed in a non-inertial frame uniformly accelerated in the opposite direction
Among the strange coincidences in cosmology, the worst of them is the fact that the acceleration of the Universe, averaged over a Hubble time, is zero within the measurement error
Summary
If we were to naively stick two identical objects together, we could double the attribute that gives rise to inertia, while doubling the analogous (but different) attribute responsible for the gravitational charge In both cases, mi → 2mi and mg → 2mg, even though mi and mg might have nothing to do with each other. Doubling the quantity of matter would result in q → 2q and mi → 2mi, so that the ratio q/mi would always remain the same In this case, we would see an equivalence between inertia and the electric charge, perhaps leading us to propose an alternative equivalence principle based on the notion that we could not distinguish between charges accelerated in an electromagnetic field and the analogous situation of charges being viewed in a non-inertial frame uniformly accelerated in the opposite direction.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
