There are many suggestions of "demonstrations" of the law of inertia, both in the internet and teaching physics textbooks. This work explores the following question: these demonstrations actually put the inertia in highlight? In the first part of the paper it is argued that not. The experiment explored in this work consists in a strip of paper between two bottles, balanced by its bottlenecks, which is removed without them falling. The experiment result, i.e., the upper bottle does not fall, will depend on the existence of a resultant force that does not depend (or depends a little) of the masses involved and decisively depends on the magnitude of the force application time interval. Then, an alternative experiment is suggested in which two objects with different masses receive different accelerations when subjected to forces (approximately) identical in magnitude and duration. In this experiment, Newton's second law allows a very rich analysis of the results. Finally, from a didactic point of view, the authors recommend that if the experiments are based on arguments instead of "demonstrations", the teaching of physics would be more clear and plausible.
Keywords
physics teaching; inertia; Newton's laws; demonstration
