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In the history of the study of physics, the principle of inertia and the concept of force have been the toughest stumbling blocks for students. But they have also been for teachers, if it is true that, to date, more cognitive research has been carried out in this area than in any other. More generally, all three laws of dynamics have proved difficult to understand and explain, if authors such as Halliday and Resnick, sixty years ago, in their famous text for university students went so far as to tell their readers: «even if you don’t quite understand what the laws say, just get on with your problem solving in the approved fashion and everything will come out all right» They therefore admitted that in physics teaching the difference between saying and doing was viable. This had not been the case before them: we recall the criticisms and attempts to reformulate the principle of inertia by Mach, Hertz, the reflections of Poincaré, Carnot, Leibnitz, etc., who were primarily concerned with the logical and experimental consistency of the principle, as well as the consistency between the definitions of the concepts and the laws of motion, which could not be found in Newton.
That being said, to take up these long-sidelined arguments, let us ask ourselves today, both from a historical-critical and a didactic point of view: from which statement of the principle of inertia is it most appropriate to introduce the discourse? Is there a completely experimental statement? A suggestion is added
