Bamonti, Nicola (2025) Apples Falling, Buckets Rolling, and Why Inertia Keeps Trolling: Inertial Motion is Not Natural Motion. [Preprint]
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Abstract
Inertia has long been treated as the paradigm of natural motion. This paper challenges this identification through the lens of General Relativity. By refining Norton (2012)’s distinction between idealisation and approximation and drawing on key insights from Tamir (2012) regarding the theorems and proofs of Einstein and Grommer (1927), Geroch and Jang (1975), Geroch and Traschen (1987) and Ehlers and Geroch (2004), I argue that geodesic motion—commonly taken as the relativistic counterpart of inertial motion—qualifies as neither an approximation nor an idealisation. Rather, geodesic motion is best understood as a useful construct—a formal artefact of the theory’s geometric structure, lacking both real and fictitious instantiation, and ultimately excluded by the dynamical structure of General Relativity. In place of inertial motion, I develop a layered account of natural motion, which is not encoded in a single ‘master equation of motion’. Extended, structured, and backreacting bodies require dynamical formalisms of increasing refinement that systematically depart from geodesic motion. This pluralist framework displaces inertial motion as the privileged expression of pure gravitational motion, replacing it with a dynamically grounded hierarchy of approximations fully consistent with the Einstein field equations.
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| Item Type: | Preprint | ||||||
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| Keywords: | Inertia, Geodesic Principle, General Relativity | ||||||
| Subjects: | General Issues > Laws of Nature General Issues > Models and Idealization Specific Sciences > Physics > Relativity Theory |
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| Depositing User: | Mr Nicola Bamonti | ||||||
| Date Deposited: | 05 Aug 2025 14:59 | ||||||
| Last Modified: | 05 Aug 2025 14:59 | ||||||
| Item ID: | 26127 | ||||||
| Subjects: | General Issues > Laws of Nature General Issues > Models and Idealization Specific Sciences > Physics > Relativity Theory |
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| Date: | 20 April 2025 | ||||||
| URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/26127 |
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