Chronology | Current Month | Current Thread | Current Date |
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] | [Date Index] [Thread Index] | [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] | [Date Prev] [Date Next] |
The pedagogical issue with this, however, is that whereas everybody
knows what you mean by "push/pull", almost no student will know what
you mean by "inertia". This places you in the somewhat ridiculous
position of having to explain what the synonym of a thing means when
you could just as easily explain the thing itself!
It seems to me that in spite of our understanding there is still an
element of mystery associated with the way objects continue to move
in the absence of a force, so we need a cause
I'm not saying inertia is really a cause because we know in the
Newtonian context we do not need one but in our instinctive
aristotlean framework we think we do so we give it a name inertia. It
then becomes part of the conversation even though it is meaningless
and confusion results
As my college physics teacher often said, Physics explains how, not
why.