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arXiv · 2607.02614

What if active and passive gravitational masses were not equal?

Domenico Giulini
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Abstract

At first glance, combining Newton's laws of motion with his law of gravitation seems straightforward. Students learn to distinguish inertial from gravitational mass and that their empirical equality is a remarkable fact about nature that will later serve as the conceptual gateway to general relativity. However, a closer look reveals a further and often neglected distinction within Newtonian gravity: that between active and passive gravitational mass. A common textbook argument maintains that these must be equal, for otherwise Newton's third law would be violated. We review and critically re-examine this familiar reasoning and show that the supposed theoretical proof is not compelling. Our analysis highlights subtle structural assumptions within Newtonian mechanics and offers physics teachers and researchers a fresh opportunity to explore foundational questions with potentially interesting applications in observational astronomy. In addition, an extended appendix, which is not part of the published AJP paper, offers some mathematical background material on the Galilean group and its action as group of dynamical symmetries for the type of dynamical equations considered here.

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Domenico Giulini. 2026-07-01. What if active and passive gravitational masses were not equal?. https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0280019

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