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I was going through the chapter of "Newton's Laws of Motion", where I was introduced to the concept of inertia in Newton's First Law. I saw that all objects that have mass will have inertia. But I do not really get it.

What is the reason behind objects having inertia? And why is it that only those objects that have mass have inertia? I tried researching on the matter a bit, but until now I have not found any satisfactory answer.

PM 2Ring
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Black Fire
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  • Which book? Also, try adding a few spaces between the punctuations to make your question more readable. –  Jun 19 '20 at 11:27
  • Inertia term is not well defined in physics so far!, but most of the people treat inertia as a power to resist it's change of state where state is like if a body is moving inertia is the property to resist any change in its motion – आर्यभट्ट Jun 19 '20 at 11:31
  • You know, @FakeMod it is the textbook of our school. – Black Fire Jun 19 '20 at 11:35
  • Yes I know that @Yuvraj. But why do the objects resist its change of state? – Black Fire Jun 19 '20 at 11:37
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    Does this answer your question? Why does inertia happen? – PM 2Ring Jun 19 '20 at 11:52
  • Well @PM2Ring I saw the answer that is given in the link that you have given, but actually I am currently at secondary standard so I am finding it difficult to understand. – Black Fire Jun 19 '20 at 11:58
  • Ok. The top answer there is pretty technical. It uses university level physics. But see this comment by dmckee. We see in our experiments that objects with mass resist changes in motion, so our laws of physics need to cover that behaviour. But fundamentally, we can't really explain why the universe works that way. – PM 2Ring Jun 19 '20 at 12:03
  • We can say if inertia didn't exist then the smallest force would cause infinite acceleration. And our universe clearly isn't like that. But we can't say why the universe isn't like that. – PM 2Ring Jun 19 '20 at 12:06
  • ok @PM2Ring....I see. It is the fundamental isn't it? – Black Fire Jun 19 '20 at 12:11
  • @PM2Ring Sorry, but that conclusion doesn't follows from your premises. You assume specific scenario in the absence of inertia, when actually body response to force would be undefined. We can't say what would be then, only that it would be not the way it is now. – Agnius Vasiliauskas Jun 19 '20 at 14:41
  • @Agnius If a body has zero resistance to something attempting to change its motion, then even the smallest attempt to change the body's motion ought to produce the maximum change in the body's motion. But I agree with you that it's not really appropriate to even try to apply Newton's 1st law to a universe where inertia doesn't exist. – PM 2Ring Jun 19 '20 at 15:04
  • @PM2Ring Zero resistance implies infinitesimal small inertia, which is a different case when simply inertia as a property is undefined. It's not clear what scenarios we should analyze. – Agnius Vasiliauskas Jun 19 '20 at 15:16

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I have heard that; the interaction of the wave associated with a sub-atomic particle, with the Higgs field, tends to oppose any change in the velocity of the wave. The term “inertia” means pretty much the same thing as momentum = mv. To have inertia, an object must have mass.

R.W. Bird
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