Are not the gross bodies and light convertible into one another, and may not bodies receive much of their activity from the particles of light which enter their composition?
'Issac Newton, Query 30, Opticks'
In 1717 Isaac Newton speculated that light particles and matter particles were inter-convertible. After that there were many attempts in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century—like those of J. J. Thomson (1881), Oliver Heaviside (1888), and George Frederick Charles Searle (1897)—to understand how the mass of a charged object depends on the electrostatic field. Because the electromagnetic field carries part of the momentum of a moving charge, it was also suspected that the mass of an electron would vary with velocity near the speed of light. Searle calculated that it is impossible for a charged object to supersede the velocity of light because this would require an infinite amount of energy.
Following Thomson and Searle (1896), Wilhelm Wien (1900), Max Abraham (1902), and Hendrik Lorentz (1904) argued that this relation applies to the complete mass of bodies, because all inertial mass is electromagnetic in origin. The formula of the mass–energy-relation given by them was m = (4 / 3)E / c2. Wien went on by stating, that if it is assumed that gravitation is an electromagnetic effect too, then there has to be a strict proportionality between (electromagnetic) inertial mass and (electromagnetic) gravitational mass. This interpretation is in the now discredited electromagnetic world-view, and the formulas that they discovered always included a factor of 4/3 in the proportionality.
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