this thread, and general discussions of the Higgs Boson made me start thinking about the fact that the quantity that causes inertia is the same quantity that leads to gravity namely mass. On the surface there doesn’t seem to be any reason that this should be true. But thinking it over, if we believe Einstein that gravity is caused by the warping of space-time, then could it be that what we see as inertia is really just the universe’s resistance to altering space-time warp.
Am I on something here? Do real physicists think this way? or am I just BSing about things I know nothing about?
In Newtonian mechanics, the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass is just a big coincidence. But if you do Newtonian mechanics and switch to an accelerating reference frame you end up with “fictitious forces” like the centrifugal and Coriolis forces that are naturally proportional to (inertial) mass.
It’s not too much of a lie to say that General Relativity started with the idea: “Gravitational force seems to be by all experimental results proportional to inertial mass. Fictitious forces are all intrinsically proportional to inertial mass. Maybe I’m really in an accelerated reference frame and gravity is a fictitious force.” So in GR the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass is not a coincidence, but something explained by the theory.
The “warped space-time” thing only comes in to explain: “If experiencing gravity means that I’m in an accelerated reference frame, why do I not seem to be going anywhere?”
John Wheeler said, “Space[time] tells bodies how to move and bodies tell space how to curve.”
Somehow all the fundamental forces we’ve determined are really a manifestation of one möbius-strip-like force. IANAPhysicist, but when it comes to the relationship between mass, gravity and spacetime, it still seems to remain the greatest (and most intruiging to myself) quandaries of modern physics.
