INERTIA AS A ZERO-POINT-FIELD LORENTZ FORCE

Under the hypothesis that ordinary matter is ultimately made of subele mentary constitutive primary charged entities or ''partons'' bound in the manner of traditional elementary Planck oscillators (a timehonored classical technique), it is shown that a heretofore uninvestigated Lo rentz force (specifically, the magnetic component of the Lorentz force ) arises in any accelerated reference frame from the interaction of th e partons with the vacuum electromagnetic zero-point field (ZPF). Part ons, though asymptotically free at the highest frequencies, are endowe d with a sufficiently large ''bare mass'' to allow interactions with t he ZPF at very high frequencies up to the Planck frequencies. This Lor entz force, though originating at the subelementary parton level, appe ars to produce an opposition to the acceleration of material objects a t a macroscopic level having the correct characteristics to account fo r the property pf inertia. We thus propose the interpretation that ine rtia is an electromagnetic resistance arising from the known spectral distortion of the ZPF in accelerated frames. The proposed concept also suggests a physically rigorous version of Mach's principle. Moreover, some preliminary independent corroboration is suggested for ideas pro posed by Sakharov (Dokl. Akad. Nauk SSSR 177, 70 (1968) [Sov. Phys. Do kl. 12, 1040 (1968)]) and further explored by one of us [H. E. Puthoff , Phys. Rev. A 39, 2333 (1989)] concerning a ZPF-based model of Newton ian gravity, and for the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mas s as dictated by the principle of equivalence.