You’re on a train in the station, looking out the window at the train right next to yours. One of the trains is moving, but you can’t tell which (Figure 25-2). Is your train moving and the other one stationary, or vice versa? Perhaps both are moving. How can you tell?
To address this question, let’s return to Newton’s first law, which we introduced in Section 4-3:
The first law states that an object that experiences no net force could either be at rest or in motion at a constant velocity. Newton’s laws therefore treat both cases identically. So although we might make a distinction between an object at rest and one in (uniform) motion with respect to us, the laws of physics do not. In the case of the two trains, this tells us something profound: If you have no reference to the ground or the tracks on which the trains move, there is no way to design an experiment or make a measurement that would tell you whether the other train is moving at a constant velocity with respect to yours or your train is moving a constant velocity with respect to the other one.