87.117.69.43

Inertia

The account is largely historical and I think fails to include important up to date information. Regardless of the history- Inertia is not a physical quantity. It does not appear in any list of physical quantities, for example check the National Physics Laboratory or the US version NIST. Additionally the Wikipedia entry for International System of Units does not mention inertia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units

Because inertia is not a quantity, it is not something that objects can have more or less of. The term is just about obsolete in physics but it could be loosely defined as the general property of matter to not change its velocity. This is different from the resistance to a change in velocity because things can have more or less resistance. The proper term for this resistance to change is of course, mass.

I feel this is important because the term inertia is widely used by those with some knowledge of physics but to mean different things like mass/ momentum/ a force. This of course just leads to confusion as you get conflicting statements. The conflicts arise because of the different meanings ascribed to inertia. A simple example would have inertia as a scalar (mass) and as a vector (momentum). This is how to confuse students.

Wikipedia should give the current state of affairs in physics and say that inertia is not a physical quantity and the term is not used nowadays in physics publications. 87.117.69.43 (talk) 09:57, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

---