User:StuRat/inertia

In psychology, social inertia describes a person's resistance to change.

In economics, inertia has two meanings, the tendency of an economy to continue moving in a fixed direction until a sufficient force acts to change that direction, and the "unwillingness to change" at a large firm which may contribute to a diseconomy of scale.

In physics, inertia is an property of matter, namely, a perceived resistance to change in motion. Inertia relates to the mass of an object undergoing linear motion or the moment of inertia of an object undergoing rotational motion and describes how much force or torque is needed to accelerate the object at a given rate.

Books and papers

 * Butterfield, H (1957) The Origins of Modern Science ISBN 071350160X
 * Clement, J (1982) "Students' preconceptions in introductory mechanics", American Journal of Physics vol 50, pp66-71
 * Crombie, A C (1959) Medieval and Early Modern Science, vol 2
 * McCloskey, M (1983) "Intuitive physics", Scientific American, April, pp114-123
 * McCloskey, M & Carmazza, A (1980) "Curvilinear motion in the absence of external forces: naïve beliefs about the motion of objects", Science vol 210, pp1139-1141