Topic summary
Gravitational mass
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Mass.
Inertial vs. gravitational mass
Although inertial mass, passive gravitational mass and active gravitational mass are conceptually distinct, no experiment has ever unambiguously demonstrated any difference between them. In classical mechanics, Newton's third law implies that active and passive gravitational mass must always be identical (or at least proportional), but the classical theory offers no compelling reason why the gravitational mass has to equal the inertial mass. That it does is an established empirical fact to one part in a trillion.