Next Contents Previous   Because MOND revolves around
acceleration, which is so much in the heart of inertia, one is
directed, with the above imagery in mind, to consider that
inertia itself, not just MOND, is a derived concept reflecting
the interactions of bodies with some agent in the background.
The idea, which is as old as Newton's second law, is the basic
premise of the Mach's principle. The great sense that this idea
makes has lead many to attempt its implementation. The agent
responsible for inertia had been taken to be the totality of
matter in the Universe.  Arguably, an even better candidate for
the inertia-producing agent, which I have been considering since
the early 1990s, in the hope of understanding MOND's origin, is
the vacuum. The vacuum is known to be implicated in producing or
modifying inertia; for example, through mass renormalization
effects, and through its contribution to the free Maxwell action
in the form of the Euler-Heisenberg action [Itzykson & Zuber
1980]. Another type of vacuum