Inertia

INERTIA

Inertia is the resistance of any physical object to a change in its state of motion. It is represented numerically by an object's mass. The principle of inertia is one of the fundamental principles of classical physics which are used to describe the motion of matter and how it is affected by applied forces. Inertia comes from the Latin word, "iners", meaning idle, or lazy. Sir Isaac Newton defined inertia in Definition 3 of his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which states:[1]

The vis insita, or innate force of matter is a power of resisting, by which every body, as much as in it lies, endeavors to preserve in its present state, whether it be of rest, or of moving uniformly forward in a straight line.

In common usage, however, people may also use the term "inertia" to refer to an object's "amount of resistance to change in velocity" (which is quantified by its mass), or sometimes to its momentum, depending on the context (e.g. "this object has a lot of inertia"). The term "inertia" is more properly understood as shorthand for "the principle of inertia" as described by Newton in his First Law of Motion. This law, expressed simply, says that an object that is not subject to any net external force moves at a constant velocity. In even simpler terms, inertia means that an object will always continue moving at its current speed and in its current direction until some force causes its speed or direction to change. This would include an object that is not in motion (velocity = zero), which will remain at rest until some force causes it to move.

On the surface of the Earth the nature of inertia is often masked by the effects of friction, which generally tends to decrease the speed of moving objects (often even to the point of rest), and by the acceleration due to gravity. The effects of these two forces misled classical theorists such as Aristotle, who believed that objects would move only as long as force was being applied to them.[2]Islamic theories

Main article: Physics in medieval Islam

Several Muslim scientists from the medieval Islamic world wrote Arabic treatises on theories of motion. In the early 11th century, the Arabic scientist Ibn al-Haytham (Arabic: ابن الهيثم) (Latinized as Alhacen) hypothesized that an object will move perpetually unless a force causes it to stop or change direction. Alhacen's model of motion thus bears resemblance to the law of inertia (now known as Newton's first law of motion) later stated by Galileo Galilei in the 16th century.[10]

Alhacen's contemporary, the Persian scientist Ibn Sina (Latinized as Avicenna), developed an elaborate theory of motion, in which he made a distinction between the inclination and force of a projectile, and concluded that motion was a result of an inclination (mayl) transferred to the projectile by the thrower, and that projectile motion in a vacuum would not cease.[11] This was the first alternative to the Aristotelian theory.[12] In the Avicennan theory of motion, the violent inclination he conceived was non-self-consuming, a permanent force whose effect was dissipated only as a result of external agents such as air resistance,[11][12] making him "the first to conceive such a permanent type of impressed virtue for non-natural motion." Such a self-motion (mayl) is "almost the opposite of the Aristotelian conception of violent motion of the projectile type, and it is rather reminiscent of the principle of inertia, i.e., Newton's first law of motion."[12]

His theory of mayl also attempted to provide a quantitative relation between the weight and speed of a moving body, resembling the concept of momentum.[13] Avicenna's concept of mayl later formed the basis of Jean Buridan's theory of impetus.[13][14]Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī (973-1048) was aware that acceleration is connected with non-uniform motion.[15] The first scientist to reject Aristotle's idea that a constant force produces uniform motion was the Arabic Muslim physicist and philosopher Hibat Allah Abu'l-Barakat al-Baghdaadi in the early 12th century. He was the first to argue that a force applied continuously produces acceleration, which is considered "the fundamental law of classical mechanics",[16] and vaguely foreshadows Newton's second law of motion.

In the early 16th century, Al-Birjandi, in his analysis on the Earth's rotation, developed a hypothesis similar to Galileo's notion of "circular inertia",[17] which he described in the following observational test:

"The small or large rock will fall to the Earth along the path of a line that is perpendicular to the plane (sath) of the horizon; this is witnessed by experience (tajriba). And this perpendicular is away from the tangent point of the Earth’s sphere and the plane of the perceived (hissi) horizon. This point moves with the motion of the Earth and thus there will be no difference in place of fall of the two rocks."[18

Theory of impetus

In the 14th century, Jean Buridan rejected the notion that a motion-generating property, which he named impetus, dissipated spontaneously. Buridan's position was that a moving object would be arrested by the resistance of the air and the weight of the body which would oppose its impetus.[19] Buridan also maintained that impetus increased with speed; thus, his initial idea of impetus was similar in many ways to the modern concept of momentum. Despite the obvious similarities to more modern ideas of inertia, Buridan saw his theory as only a modification to Aristotle's basic philosophy, maintaining many other peripatetic views, including the belief that there was still a fundamental difference between an object in motion and an object at rest. Buridan also maintained that impetus could be not only linear, but also circular in nature, causing objects (such as celestial bodies) to move in a circle.
Buridan's thought was followed up by his pupil Albert of Saxony (1316–1390) and the Oxford Calculators, who performed various experiments that further undermined the classical, Aristotelian view.

Their work in turn was elaborated by Nicole Oresme who pioneered the practice of demonstrating laws of motion in the form of graphs.
Shortly before Galileo's theory of inertia, Giambattista Benedetti modified the growing theory of impetus to involve linear motion alone:

"…[Any] portion of corporeal matter which moves by itself when an impetus has been impressed on it by any external motive force has a natural tendency to move on a rectilinear, not a curved, path."[20]

Benedetti cites the motion of a rock in a sling as an example of the inherent linear motion of objects, forced into circular motion.

Classical inertia

The law of inertia states that it is the tendency of an object to resist a change in motion. According to Newton's words, an object will stay at rest and or stay in motion unless acted on by a net external force, whether it results from gravity, friction, contact, or some other source. The Aristotelian division of motion into mundane and celestial became increasingly problematic in the face of the conclusions of Nicolaus Copernicus in the 16th century, who argued that the earth (and everything on it) was in fact never "at rest", but was actually in constant motion around the sun.[21] Galileo, in his further development of the Copernican model, recognized these problems with the then-accepted nature of motion and, at least partially as a result, included a restatement of Aristotle's description of motion in a void as a basic physical principle:

A body moving on a level surface will continue in the same direction at a constant speed unless disturbed.

It is also worth noting that Galileo later went on to conclude that based on this initial premise of inertia, it is impossible to tell the difference between a moving object and a stationary one without some outside reference to compare it against.[22] This observation ultimately came to be the basis for Einstein to develop the theory of Special Relativity.
Galileo's concept of inertia would later come to be refined and codified by Isaac Newton as the first of his Laws of Motion (first published in Newton's work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, in 1687):

Unless acted upon by a net unbalanced force, an object will maintain a constant velocity

Note that "velocity" in this context is defined as a vector, thus Newton's "constant velocity" implies both constant speed and constant direction (and also includes the case of zero speed, or no motion). Since initial publication, Newton's Laws of Motion (and by extension this first law) have come to form the basis for the almost universally accepted branch of physics now termed classical mechanics.

The actual term "inertia" was first introduced by Johannes Kepler in his Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae (published in three parts from 1618–1621); however, the meaning of Kepler's term (which he derived from the Latin word for "idleness" or "laziness") was not quite the same as its modern interpretation. Kepler defined inertia only in terms of a resistance to movement, once again based on the presumption that rest was a natural state which did not need explanation. It was not until the later work of Galileo and Newton unified rest and motion in one principle that the term "inertia" could be applied to these concepts as it is today.

Nevertheless, despite defining the concept so elegantly in his laws of motion, even Newton did not actually use the term "inertia" to refer to his First Law. In fact, Newton originally viewed the phenomenon he described in his First Law of Motion as being caused by "innate forces" inherent in matter, which resisted any acceleration. Given this perspective, and borrowing from Kepler, Newton actually attributed the term "inertia" to mean "the innate force possessed by an object which resists changes in motion"; thus Newton defined "inertia" to mean the cause of the phenomenon, rather than the phenomenon itself. However, Newton's original ideas of "innate resistive force" were ultimately problematic for a variety of reasons, and thus most physicists no longer think in these terms.

As no alternate mechanism has been readily accepted, and it is now generally accepted that there may not be one which we can know, the term "inertia" has come to mean simply the phenomenon itself, rather than any inherent mechanism. Thus, ultimately, "inertia" in modern classical physics has come to be a name for the same phenomenon described by Newton's First Law of Motion, and the two concepts are now basically equivalent.