Synonyms
Definition
The Law of Inertia is the foundational principle of classical physics that entails a body free from external constraints conserves its state of uniform rectilinear motion. Its emergence during the Scientific Revolution marked a break from the Aristotelian natural philosophy that had dominated explanations of natural phenomena and which held that place was an essential predicate of bodies, and therefore, all local motions are changes – of place – resulting from the activity of some cause and strictly opposed to rest. By making motion a state of a body, and rest merely the case of zero motion, the Law of Inertia radically altered the domain of physical explanation. Only changes of the state of motion or rest required an account, not any motion whatsoever.
History of the Law of Inertia
The canonical statement of the classical Law of Inertia is in Newton’s Principia (1687), where it appears as the first “Axiom, or Law of Motion”:
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Miller, D.M. (2022). Law of Inertia. In: Jalobeanu, D., Wolfe, C.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31069-5_122
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