Part 6/19:
To mitigate the influence of false models, the rules of scientific acquisition have evolved, emphasizing the identification and elimination of doppelgangers. This approach aims to accelerate discovery by avoiding the long cycle of counterexamples endemic to classical methods.
Disambiguating Weight, Mass, and Inertia
A key step in this evolution is distinguishing weight from mass, and further disambiguating inertia from mass. Based on Einstein’s principle of equivalence, inertia and weight are interchangeable, but they are not the same intrinsically. Modern physics has introduced the term mass to represent quantity, but this is a false surrogate for inertia—the true property mediating resistance to acceleration.