Einstein's Mach's Principle, Superconnections, Higgs Fields and Cosmology
Yuval Ne’eman · Proceedings of International Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics — PoS(HEP2005) · 2007
A brief history of inertia and Mach's Principle.Conceptual physics woke up from its long hibernation when H. Crescas postulated his infinite absolute space, as the stage on which physical reality was and is played forever**, Galileo then conceived inertia, a body's indifference to changes in its position -though still resisting changes in its velocity, a notion adopted by I. Newton in his first law, with mass defined as a measure of that resistance in his second law.Albert Einstein's [1] Special Theory of Relativity took care of an unexpected absolute element in velocity space, namely the velocity of light, which is the same to all observers, a priviledged status justified by H. Minkowski's geometrical interpretation [2]; in Einstein's General Theory of Relativity [3], the two Principles of Covariance and Equivalence deny any absolute status to both positions and velocities in spacetime.Inertia and "free" masses thus contradict Relativity, as emphasized by Einstein in his "Mach's Principle" argumentation [4] and explained by him as a conjectured universal 'matter to matter' interaction -in the Physics of Particles and Fields (PPF) between all quark and lepton fields -generating the semblance of inertia (Einstein assumed that this was a magneticlike component of classical Gravity) through its effect being dominated at any position by the contributions from the universe's material clusters most distant from that point [5].The new interaction's effective coupling j should be weak enough for it to have remained undetected to date in measurements of Newton's constant, etc.To achieve that 'dominance by the farthest' organizing the material content of the universe in an onion of concentric shells, assuming a European