SOME FINDINGS ON A PATH TO A FULLY ELECTROMAGNETIC DESCRIPTION OF INERTIA

Michael Ibison
Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin
4030 West Braker Lane, Suite 300
Austin, TX 78759, USA

We outline here an ongoing program whose goal is a small step on the road towards unification of EM and GR: a purely electromagnetic description of the inertial mass of the electron. Though only a tiny piece of a much larger puzzle, it is believed that progress here will provide some justification for pursuit of an electromagnetic origin of inertial mass in general, and (consequently) an electromagnetic basis for general relativity. At the outset this program denies to electric charge any a priori (intrinsic) inertial energy. Necessarily excluded therefore are any schemes that adjust an intrinsic bare (seed) mass through electromagnetic selfaction or interactions, including conventional mass-renormalization. Also excluded are Poincaré, Lorentz and Schwinger classical models of electric charge, since these all involve non-electromagnetic forces. Infinite selfaction, therefore, spells doom for such an enterprise. Instead, we start out with a universe populated by structureless, massless bare charges, and ask under what circumstances, if any, would the charge appear to acquire a finite energy from exclusively electromagnetic interactions with other charges and vacuum EM fields. We trace the flow of the argument that leads from these initial assumptions and requirements to a number of more-or-less inevitable conclusions about the characteristics of viable candidate models. On the issue of self-action, we present a novel finding that electromagnetic self-energy can be rendered finite under tightly-constrained conditions involving the relative superluminal motions of intrinsically massless charges. And we argue why electron inertial mass - if entirely of electromagnetic origin – can only arise from timesymmetric mutual EM interactions, i.e. with other charges. As a consequence, the program draws some encouragement from the observation that the Dirac Large Number ‘coincidence’ 2 e H H m e N R ˇ« turns out to be the condition (dynamically-maintained) for global self-consistency of such time-symmetric interactions. The presentation concludes with a rough sketch of a possible route from this massless, superluminal, charge towards a purely electromagnetic interpretation of both the mass and the bi-spinor wavefunction in Dirac’s equation.