Where is information of motion stored?
I've asked variations of this question a few times to a few people. My physics professor answered it with: "if no forces act on an object why should it stop, start, or do anything else?" But that doesn't do it for me, because it doesn't (seem to) address my question. Maybe this is a bad question and I'm lacking some fundamental understanding about motion that would simply put me right, but I haven't found that yet, so here it goes...
Let's take two practically identical objects and place them in an empty frictionless universe at rest with respect to each other. We apply a force to one of the objects, say the rightmost one, and it starts off moving to the right. The energy of the force looks to be stored within the object itself in the form of its momentum, which is dependent on mass and velocity. To conserve the energy in momentum, the relationship between mass and velocity should result in some constant. Typically, objects don't fluctuate in mass, so velocity stays constant and the object proceeds at constant velocity forever.
We, the experimenters, sit in some Olympian position to view all of this. 927
We look in detail at the particles of the leftmost object in its own inertial frame, look in detail at the particles of the rightmost object in its own inertial frame, and compare notes. When we created the universe, both objects started out physically identical, and after we accelerated the rightmost object, they still remain physically identical. Yet, the rightmost object moves at constant velocity, maintains constant momentum/obeys energy conservation, and thus somehow stores information about the force that acted on it in the past. Yet, no change happened to the objects' make-up.
Question: Where/how is this information stored? How do objects “know” and tend to their motion? I appreciate any answer, but I would more easily understand an answer in layman terms.
My thoughts surrounding this question (may disregard):
Physically, where the heck is this information? Somewhere in the matter, in space-time itself? I've never heard of quanta of momentum (momentum particles—well, what keeps those going? More momentum particles?). My fear is that the answer to this question reduces down to some inherent property of spatial dimensions. I'm not saying that such an answer or an other shouldn't be correct—if it is, then it is. Again, I'm approaching this with the base assumption that I'm lacking a crucial understanding. But, if the cause of motion in matter is just unphysical, what confounds and frightens me is how something with no physical manifestation may orchestrate all motion in the universe.
Thank you for your time. 562