Connectivity and the Origin of Inertia

Newton's Second Law defines inertial mass as the ratio of the applied force on an object to the responding acceleration of the object (viz., F=ma). Objects that exhibit finite accelerations under finite forces are described as being "massive'' and this mass has usually been considered to be an innate property of the particles composing the object. However mass itself is never directly measured. It is inertia, the reaction of the object to impressed forces, that is measured. We show that the effects of inertia are equally well explained as a consequence of the vacuum fields acting on massless particles travelling in geodesic motion. In this approach, the vacuum fields in the particle's history define the curvature of the particle's spacetime. The metric describing this curvature implies a transformation to Minkowski spacetime, which we call the Connective transformation. Application of the Connective transformation produces the usual effects of inertia when observed in Minkowski spacetime, including hyperbolic motion in a static electric field (above the vacuum) and uniform motion following an impulse. In the case of the electromagnetic vacuum fields, the motion of the massless charge is a helical motion that can be equated to the particle spin of quantum theory. This spin has the properties expected from quantum theory, being undetermined until "measured'' by applying a field, and then being found in either a spin up or spin down state. Furthermore, the zitterbewegung of the charge is at the speed of light, again in agreement with quantum theory. Connectivity also allows for pair creation as the Connective transformation can transform positive time intervals in the particle spacetime to negative time intervals in Minkowski spacetime.