http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-ijv081005.php
The article is from the NEW SCIENTIST and is found here:
http://www.newscientist.com/ in its original sourcing.
In summary Alfonso Rueda of California State University in Long Beach and Bernard Haisch, who was at the California Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Scotts Valley and is now with ManyOne Networks have suggested that inertia and gravitation are derived properties of particle interaction with the "Zero Point" or vacuum energy field of virtual photons.
I once confused this idea of vacuum energy interaction with matter with something called the Casimir Effect.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/casimir.html
but have since realized that my insufficient and superficial understanding of the Casimir Effect and physics in general produced my erroneous assumption.
I thought if the effect was observed it was so minor and short-ranged as to be either an observation error and/or a faulty hypothesis or else something so negligible that it was not possible as an explanation for macro-field effects.
As I read this article, I find myself thoroughly confused. I understand the residual virtual photon soup idea that is supposed to be vacuum energy, but how is a field of virtual particles supposed to replace as a mechanism the Higgs field and its associated Higgs boson as an explanation of mass and inertia?
It makes no sense to me to claim that the properties of mass and inertiia which should operate within the standard model this way(forces/bosons) are instead imposed as a result of "virtual photon impedence".
It(virtual photon impedence) may help to explain the equivalence of inertia and gravitation in some fashion but it fails to account for the property of mass. This hypothesis; like the Higgs field/boson model fails to unify gravitation, inertia, and mass as a single interaction satisfying the inertial loading of mass acceleration inside a gravitational field with a single actor. I just cannot help but believe that somehow physics took a wrong turn somewhere when the QM crowd started hammering away at the problems of gravity, mass, and inertia. The other three binding forces line up with their mutual interactions reasonably well to make progressive unification at greater energy densities a straightforward exercise. Why is gravity and the properties I(mistakenly?) associate with it, mass and inertia, the oddball?.
