  We report on the progress of a NASA-funded study being carried out at the
Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto and the California
State University in Long Beach to investigate the proposed link between the
zero-point field of the quantum vacuum and inertia. It is well known that an
accelerating observer will experience a bath of radiation resulting from the
quantum vacuum which mimics that of a heat bath, the so-called Davies-Unruh
effect. We have further analyzed this problem of an accelerated object moving
through the vacuum and have shown that the zero-point field will yield a
non-zero Poynting vector to an accelerating observer. Scattering of this
radiation by the quarks and electrons constituting matter would result in an
acceleration-dependent reaction force that would appear to be the origin of
inertia of matter (Rueda and Haisch 1998a, 1998b). In the subrelativistic case
this inertia reaction force is exactly newtonian and in the relativistic case
it exactly reproduces the well known relativistic extension of Newton's Law.
This analysis demonstrates then that both the ordinary, F=ma, and the
relativistic forms of Newton's equation of motion may be derived from Maxwell's
equations as applied to the electromagnetic zero-point field. We expect to be
able to extend this analysis in the future to more general versions of the
quantum vacuum than just the electromagnetic one discussed herein.
