Inertia Revealed; Mass; Galileo Experiment; Pioneer 10 & 11 Anamoly; Equivalence Principle; Mass at relativistic speeds; Centrifugal/Centripetal forces; ALL related - ALL Explained

A ‘60s dictionary definition:  Inertia.  A property manifested by all matter, representing the resistance to any alteration in its state of motion.  Mass is the quantitative measure of inertia.

A similar definition is still in the Oxford dictionary but you would be hard pressed to find such a simple and clear account in today’s physics literature.

Isaac Newton and Ernst Mach recognized and characterized inertia, then Einstein gave it special status e.g. who could forget “inertial reference frames”?   Despite all of the attention however, nobody has ever explained exactly what inertia is and how it works.

“Why shouldn’t a car keep rolling on level ground all by itself if there is little friction to stop it?”  That question once floored me because it takes a lot of work to push a car and get it moving in the first place!  A better question would be, “why is it not a continuous struggle to push a car; why does the initial resistance magically dissipate?”

Equally mysterious is why external force is again required to stop the car.  What force continues to make the car move that requires a definite counter force?”

Nothing is ever really at rest in the absolute sense and we couldn’t tell if it was.  We are moving through space as the earth turns and orbits the sun etc.  These things are not noticed because the motion is relatively constant and any acceleration that could be felt is overwhelmed by earth’s gravity.  While sitting in your chair you have established ‘equilibrium’ in your gravity links to earth and millions of stars.

In Anim. 1 above, a ball is sitting on a table and has millions of gravity (energy links) pulling it in all directions.  Most pulls cancel except for a somewhat higher concentration to/from earth, on the bottom.

Links are continually replaced as one body eclipses another or some links get swept into collisions with others crossing their paths in the fabric of space-time.

Even though the links come and go, there are millions on the ball at any given instant.  Any attempt to move the ball will instantly bring the attached ‘side’ links up against others crossing their paths.  One or the other must be sheared as the body moves, and this obviously requires work.

Inertia resists acceleration because of gravity links that must be sheared.

Pre-existing links to everything near or far is the only explanation for why inertia comes into effect instantly, anywhere, and in any direction.

Note how ‘side’ links are continuously sheared and replaced.  Here’s the secret however; as soon as the ball moves it picks up extra links in ‘front’. 

This increased probability of forming gravity links in ‘front’ is analogous to running in the rain.  You will get equally wet whether you run or walk in the rain   

for the same duration.  If you run however, you will get wetter in front than elsewhere because you intercept more raindrops that would otherwise have fallen ahead of you.  The extra pulls in ‘front’ defeat the resistance of ‘side’ links and continue to shear them.  

The extra pulls in ‘front’ are from anything including the distant stars.  This is the previously unacknowledged force that continues to make things go while apparently unaided.

The ball would keep rolling indefinitely were it not for friction and wind resistance.  If we try to accelerate the ball some more, we have to shear even more ‘side’ links per second, which requires more work.  Once an incremental increase in speed is achieved, the ball establishes and maintains a running total of even more links in ‘front’.  The additional ‘front’ links handle the additional shearing load, and a new equilibrium is reached.  The ball will tend to continue its motion at the new velocity.

Inertia is again encountered if we wish to decelerate the ball.  In order to slow down the ball we must apply an external force to oppose the extra ‘front’ lines.  Once speed is reduced, some of the extra ‘front’ lines are quickly lost to attrition.  Because of the lower speed, the latter are not replaced and a new equilibrium is again found. 

Finally, the end block counters the extra ‘front’ links and stops the ball.  With the ball no longer moving, the extra ‘front’ links are quickly lost to attrition and equilibrium is restored.

Inertia turns up again in Galileo’s counter-intuitive experiment.  Why do objects in partial vacuum, at the same point in earth’s gravitational field always fall at the same speed regardless of size or composition?  

The proverbial lead bar may be 1000 times as heavy as the feather (due to 1000 times as many energy links pulling it to earth).  What we tend to forget however, is that the lead bar will also have more inertia (1000 times as many ‘side’ energy links to shear when it falls).

The density of energy links in earth’s field determines the ratio of how many succeed in becoming gravity links on a falling body; relative to the number of shear-resistance links on the body.    That ratio is the same for all falling bodies at the same point in the same gravitational field.

Link for link, the lead bar is no easier or harder to accelerate than the feather.  At each incremental stage of acceleration, the two bodies will fall with the same velocity and consequently hit ground at the same time.

While thinking about the Galileo experiment, Einstein recognized that inertia must somehow be involved and without really understanding the fundamental mechanism, he mathematically proved that gravitational mass and inertial mass are equivalent.  This was reportedly his happiest thought. 

If they are distinctive properties, how could they be equivalent?  This seeming contradiction is often explained as follows:

Mass is a measure of the amount of matter (stuff) in a body and that does not change. If properly measured on earth, a heaving ship, on the moon, or in space; results are the same.  Its mass is its mass, period.

Considering equivalence in terms of energy links is very similar.  The body has a ‘pool’ of source and termination couplings available to form links to the ‘outside’.  The number of couplings in that pool does not change.  Gravity and inertia both operate on the body’s exact same pool of couplings so naturally, mass of the body is not only equivalent but one in the same.

In practice, mass is measured by determining the acceleration of a body due to application of a known force.  A suitably sized object can then be designated a ‘Standard Mass’.

An alternative way to measure a body’s mass is then possible by comparing it to a ‘standard’ mass on a balance scale.  The strength of the gravitational field does not affect the measurement because it is common to both.

Because mass is measured indirectly, without understanding its fundamental nature, its legacy is confusing to say the least.   This can all be avoided by thinking in terms of energy links.

Mass is simply the pull(s) of energy link(s).  The mass of a body is a measure of how much matter it contains; which is manifested in the pulls of the total number of energy links it can sustain to the ‘outside’.

Most people have trouble believing that a particle’s mass really increases at relativistic speeds.   When a particle is accelerated to near light speed, it does not get bigger and does not comprise any more matter than before.  How then can its mass increase?

This contradiction is the result of a weakness in the indirect way mass was originally defined and measured.

At relativistic speed, only the particle’s inertia actually increases. However, by the original definition its mass necessarily must also increase.

At near light speed, the particle’s ‘front’ lines can only pull it forward at a maximum of c and start to slacken.  More and more external force is needed to further accelerate the particle because proportionally less pull is gained in ‘front’.  The particle’s inertia increases because it becomes harder to accelerate.

These forces are also easy to understand in terms of energy links.  Consider for example, swinging a ball on a string around your head.  At any moment, ‘straight ahead’ for the ball is a line tangent to its circular path.  This is where the ball will go if released because of extra links on its ‘front’ pulling it to the stars ahead.  If you do not release the ball then you have to keep pulling it into the circle and away from its natural path.

As you swing the ball, you are accelerating it towards the centre of the circle from an infinite number of points on its circumference.  The outward pull you feel is resistance to your accelerations repeatedly shearing additional ‘side-lines’ on the ball.  Whether the ball is released or not, these centrifugal/centripetal effects are all due to the ball ‘hanging onto the stars’.

This would be a shock to Newton because it is not evident in everyday experience.   

In 1980, John Anderson of JPL noticed that Pioneer 10 & 11 spacecraft were inexplicably slowing down.   Nearly ten years after launch, they were nearing the edge of the solar system. They checked for spacecraft malfunctions, their own calculations, radio beams, solar radiation, and solar wind etc.  Decades later, now well beyond any solar effects, nothing had changed. 

The slowdown is miniscule but after 37 years it adds up, leaving Pioneer 10 about 121,000 miles short. Scientists are still scratching their heads over this one and resist ‘new science’.

Continued motion of a body does tend to collect more gravity links in front to maintain its motion but unlike moving electric and magnetic fields, there is no mutual reinforcement to replace a lost link, however rare.

It should now be obvious from these pages that inertia will gradually deteriorate over distance, albeit extremely slowly. 

Dr. John D. Anderson reports that both spacecraft slow by the same amount over the same interval of time.  We cannot predict exactly when a ‘front’ link will be lost but like radioactive decay, the rate is constant when averaged over time.  We could therefore also quantify “Inertial Decay” by its half-life.

The author interprets the fixed decay rate as confirmation that the incredibly small dispersion of gravity links “G” is constant, at least to the edge of our solar system.