Inertia as a Manifestation of the Reality of Spacetime

Abstract

The issues of inertia and gravitation have been the most significant puzzles in physics for centuries. Even now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the situation is the same – the nature of inertia remains an unsolved mystery in modern physics and our understanding of gravity can be described in almost the same way, since the modern theory of gravitation, general relativity, has not added much to our understanding of the mechanism of the gravitational interaction. General relativity, which provides a surprisingly simple and beautiful no-force explanation for the gravitational interaction of bodies following geodesic paths, remains silent on such important questions as how matter curves spacetime and what is the nature of the very force we identify as gravitational – the force acting upon a body deviated from its geodesic path while being at rest in a gravitational field.