Photographer Unknown, (Ponder / Ponderous)
Origin: Late Middle English: via French from Latin “ponderosus”, from “pondus”, ponder- ‘weight.’
In the 20th century, the Newtonian concepts of absolute time and space were challenged by relativity. Einstein’s equivalence principle put all observers, moving or accelerating, on the same footing. This led to an ambiguity as to what exactly is meant by the force of gravity and weight. A scale in an accelerating elevator cannot be distinguished from a scale in a gravitational field. Gravitational force and weight thereby became essentially frame-dependent quantities.
This prompted the abandonment of the concept as superfluous in the fundamental sciences such as physics and chemistry. Nonetheless, the concept remained important in the teaching of physics. The ambiguities introduced by relativity led, starting in the 1960s, to considerable debate in the teaching community as how to define weight for their students, choosing between a nominal definition of weight as the force due to gravity or an operational definition defined by the act of weighing.
–Igal Galili, 2001