Re: The mystery of Inertia

proton wrote:

I've read in a few articles about the "mystery" or the "origin" of
inertia, however I don't really understand what this mystery is about.

If I understood correctly, the principle of inertia can be easily
derived (in classical mechanics, at least) from the symmetry of space.
See for example, the textbook of Landau & Lifshitz "Course of
theoretical physics", where Newton's laws are derived from symmetry
principles and Galilean relativity. So what is the problem?

Newton was wrong.

I will advance two possible answers, and I would like to ask to
comment on them:

- the mystery is not about inertia itself (i.e. the fact that matter
continues to move unless acted upon by a force), but about the fact
that inertial mass is identical to gravitational mass. That's where
Mach's principle enters the scene to try to explain this
"coincidence".

No. Inerital vs. gravitational mass is the Equivalence Principle. Any
gravitation theory must either demand (metric gravitation and string
theory) or ignore (affine, teleparallel, noncommutative) the EP. The
only interesting empirical tests target the disjoint non-overlap of
the two approaches (since the former is wholly contained within the
latter).

The only divergence between empirically validated non-falsified metric
and non-metric gravitation is angular momentum - physical spin,
quantum spin (magnets; polarized electron spin and orbital angular
momentum), relativistic spin-orbit coupling, chirality. The only
allowed macroscopic divergence sufficently large to be measured given
current technology comprises two simple questions:

1) Do local chemically identical, opposite parity mass
distributions vacuum free fall along identical minimum action
trajectories? (Do left and right hands fall identically?)

2) Do local chemically identical, opposite parity mass
distributions fit into space with identical energies? (Do left and
right hands melt identically?)

If non-metric gravitation is correct, the vacuum has a chiral
background. Both (1) and (2) are then answered "detectably no."

- the mystery is about whether inertia is a property of matter or of
space. I don't really understand this, but it's what I gathered from
some paper.

I would very much appreciate if anyone could enlighten me about this.

http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qz4.pdf
Explanation, calculation, reduction to practice
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/lajos.htm#a2
More sensitive reduction to practice.

--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/
(Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/lajos.htm#a2
.

Loading