Abstract

An opportunity for revealing the nature of inertia and gravitation in terms of both general relativity and the electromagnetic mass theory may have been missed in the first quarter of this century. If the entire mass of an elementary charged particle is regarded as electromagnetic in origin, a hypothesis providing a consistent explanation of inertial and gravitational phenomena emerges. Due to the anisotropy in the propagation of electromagnetic interaction in the vicinity of all (massive) objects the electric field of an electron at rest on the Earth's surface is distorted which gives rise to an electric self-force trying to force the electron to move downwards (hence the passive gravitational mass turns out to be electromagnetic); the anisotropy is compensated if the electron is falling with an acceleration g --in this case its electric field is the Coulomb field and the electron's motion is geodesic (non-resistant) in accordance with general relativity. The behaviour of an electron in an accelerated reference frame is identical (the anisotropy in the speed of light in this case is caused by the frame's accelerated motion). This hypothesis can be experimentally tested and opens up the possibility of (at least partly) controlling inertia and gravitation. Even if one insists on the present understanding that only part of the electron mass is electromagnetic it still follows that the possibility for (partly) controlling inertia and gravitation and for an experimental test has been present since the beginning of this century when the electromagnetic mass theory was proposed. It has not been realized up to now that it immediately follows from this theory that part of the electron's active gravitational mass is electromagnetic in origin too which means that part of its gravity being caused by its charge (since part of its active gravitational mass itself is electromagnetic) is also electromagnetic in nature. And if we can control other electromagnetic phenomena nothing in principle prevents us from doing so to inertia and gravitation as well