Mach's Principle and the Origin of Inertia
Abstract
The current status of Mach's principle is discussed within the context of general relativity. The inertial properties of a particle are determined by its mass and spin, since these characterize the irreducible unitary representations of the inhomogeneous Lorentz group. The origin of the inertia of mass and intrinsic spin are discussed and the inertia of intrinsic spin is studied via the coupling of intrinsic spin with rotation. The implications of spin-rotation coupling and the possibility of history dependence and nonlocality in relativistic physics are briefly mentioned.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1509.01869,
title = {Mach's Principle and the Origin of Inertia},
author = {B. Mashhoon},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.01869},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
14 pages. Dedicated to Carl Brans in honor of his 80th birthday. To appear in the Brans Festschrift; v2: typo corrected, published in: At the Frontier of Spacetime, edited by T. Asselmeyer-Maluga (Springer, 2016), Chapter 10, pp. 177-187