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Originally Posted by Ken G
It seems to me this thread is not about inertia, it is about, "how, or why, can you tell when you are in an accelerating reference frame?"
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From the context of the original post from which Nereid clipped the questions, (here:
Einstein over-exalted?) I assume the OP wanted to know
how inertia can be explained in GR. In other words, what mechanical concept lies behind GR inertia. This is a simple question, but it cuts to the heart of the problems Einstein had with his own theories. With thought-experiments and fitting, he made his theories of relativity describe the physical world pretty well. Unfortunately, while he continued to try to discover just
what his theories were modeling so he could unite gravitation with other fundamental forces, a generation of physicists learned to deal with his math and elevated the mathematical approximation to the status of reality. This gives rise to some pretty odd concepts, like massless corpuscular photons hurtling along geodesics in curved space-time.
Einstein himself did not believe in this concept, and he insisted that in space there must exist a medium through which light waves can propagate, saying that light could not cross "empty" space. Read his Leyden address of 1920 and read "Uber den Ather" ("On the Ether") of 1924 to see where he was headed with this. I guarantee that it will change the way you look at relativity.