18. Newton on Mass and Force

The concepts of mass and force, as understood in contemporary physics, mean qualities of matter. The somewhat mysterious quality "mass" is said to appear in two or even three differ-ent ways: inertial mass, active gravitational mass, and passive gravitational mass. Generally Isaac Newton is taught to have first introduced the concept and its different appearing as inertial or gravitational mass into theoretical physics, while Albert Einstein is highly praised for having shown the indiscriminate equivalence of both concepts. A look into Newton's Principia of 1687, however, helps to see that Newton neither understood "mass" as a quality, but rather as only another name for a quantity of matter (which quantity he defined not in words, but mathematically), nor did he ever explicitly or implicitly teach any distinction between an "inertial" and a "gravitational" aspect of matter. So it seems that to rely on Newton's authentic teaching could perhaps not only relativize Einstein's merit as to the simplification of the concept of mass, but also make proof against Jammer's (2000) depressing conclusion "that the notion of mass, although fundamental to physics, is still shrouded in mystery." Accordingly, the paper aims at showing some quite surprising insights into the realm of modern physics - from the Newtonian view on the closely related, but different entities "mass" and "force".

[Den vollständigen Text finden Sie im PDF-Download.]PDF öffnen