A Note on the Origin of Inertia

Abstract

The question of where the inertial properties of matter come from has been open for a long time. Isaac Newton considered inertia an intrinsic property of matter. Ernst Mach held a different view whereby the inertia of a body comes from its interaction with the rest of the universe. This idea is known today as Mach's principle. We discuss Mach's principle based on transactional gravity, the recently developed completion of the entropic gravity program by the physics of quantum events induced by transactions. A consequence of the analysis is a fundamental relation between the gravitational constant G and the total mass in the causal universe, derived by means of entropic principles.