What is Inertia ?

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You've overslept, so your mother has to drive you to school. Since you're late, she doesn't seem to be taking the usual care in driving. She drives quickly through the neighborhood, and with every turn she takes, you feel yourself being pulled. As she approaches the school, she slams on the breaks, narrowly missing an oncoming train. Thankfully, you are wearing your seat belt.

You finally arrive at school, and you run up and push the door open. But the door is locked, and the force of your push knocks you down to the ground. This wild adventure was made possible by Newton's law of inertia.

Inertia is defined as the property of any matter (physical object or a body) to continue to remain in its state of rest or uniform motion unless acted upon by an external force.

Inertia is a property of an object, and it refers to the resistance of change in motion. As you rode in the car to school, your body traveled in the same direction and speed as the car.

This means that an object which is motionless will continue to remain motionless unless an external force is applied on it. Also the force that will be required to move a motionless body is proportional to its mass. In common language we sometimes use the words mass and weight interchangeably. However, there is a difference between the two. The mass is actually a measure of matter contained in an object.

When your mom turned the corner, your body resisted against that change in direction--it wanted to keep going straight. That's why you felt a slight pull as she made a sharp turn--because of inertia.

Inertia in moving objects means that an object that is moving in a straight line at constant speed will continue to move in the same direction and with the same speed unless an external force is applied to it. The result of applying an external force to an object in uniform motion, depending on the direction of the force applied, will be to change the speed, or direction of movement, or both.

The concept pf inertia was first introduced by Sir Issac Newton in his First Law of Motion. This law states that a body will continue to remain in its state of rest or uniform motion unless acted upon by an external force.

In a previous chapter of study, the variety of ways by which motion can be described (words, graphs, diagrams, numbers, etc.) was discussed.

In this unit (Newton's Laws of Motion), the ways in which motion can be explained will be discussed. Isaac Newton (a 17th century scientist) put forth a variety of laws that explain why objects move (or don't move) as they do

Inertia is the resistance of an object to any change in its motion, including a change in direction. An object will stay still or keep moving at the same speed and in a straight line, unless it is acted upon by an outside force.

Isaac Newton's First Law of Motion describes the behavior of a massive body at rest or in uniform linear motion, i.e., not accelerating or rotating.

. These three laws have become known as Newton's three laws of motion. The focus of Lesson 1 is Newton's first law of motion - sometimes referred to as the law of inertia.

The First Law states, "A body at rest will remain at rest, and a body in motion will remain in motion unless it is acted upon by an external force."

There are two clauses or parts to this statement - one that predicts the behavior of stationary objects and the other that predicts the behavior of moving objects.

This simply means that things cannot start, stop or change direction all by themselves. It requires some force acting on them from the outside to cause such a change.

Inertia is the resistance, of any physical object, to any change in its velocity. This includes changes to the object's speed, or direction of motion.

The behavior of all objects can be described by saying that objects tend to "keep on doing what they're doing" (unless acted upon by an unbalanced force).

While this concept seems simple and obvious to us today, in Newton's time it was truly revolutionary.

An aspect of this property is the tendency of objects to keep moving in a straight line at a constant speed, when no forces are upon them—and this aspect in particular is also called inertia.

If at rest, they will continue in this same state of rest. If in motion with an eastward velocity of 5 m/s, they will continue in this same state of motion (5 m/s, East).

Newton published his laws of motion in 1687, in his seminal work "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica" (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) in which he formalized the description of how massive bodies move under the influence of external forces.

If in motion with a leftward velocity of 2 m/s, they will continue in this same state of motion (2 m/s, left). The state of motion of an object is maintained as long as the object is not acted upon by an unbalanced force.

The principle of inertia is one of the fundamental principles in classical physics that are still used today to describe the motion of objects and how they are affected by the applied forces on them.