The Origin of Rest-mass Energy
  Today we have a solid, if incomplete, physical picture of how inertia is
created in the standard model. We know that most of the visible baryonic `mass'
in the Universe is due to gluonic back-reaction on accelerated quarks, the
latter of which attribute their own inertia to a coupling with the Higgs field
-- a process that elegantly and self-consistently also assigns inertia to
several other particles. But we have never had a physically viable explanation
for the origin of rest-mass energy, in spite of many attempts at understanding
it towards the end of the nineteenth century, culminating with Einstein's own
landmark contribution in his Annus Mirabilis. Here, we introduce to this
discussion some of the insights we have garnered from the latest cosmological
observations and theoretical modeling to calculate our gravitational binding
energy with that portion of the Universe to which we are causally connected,
and demonstrate that this energy is indeed equal to mc^2 when the inertia m is
viewed as a surrogate for gravitational mass.
