If there is no such thing as matter, as some irreducible substance, which is basically what physics has shown all the way down to quarks, what becomes of mass and from whence does it arise?
Imagine a rock. It has mass and weight and inertia. Nobody would argue with that. Now imagine all the molecules in the rock being separated from each other by a very tiny distance. The rock would basically become something more like a brown cloud of molecules. The mass and weight and inertia it formally had would all be gone, and it would float away. What happened to the mass? And why does it appear to depend totally on whether the molecules are close enough to each to become a solid rock? Mass perhaps a property emerging from the compactness of the molecules and not inherent to matter itself?
From AI..
Quote:Only about 2% of the mass in an atom comes from the Higgs field coupling (intrinsic mass of quarks/electrons), while the remaining ~98% is the confined energy of gluon fields and quark movement.
So.. atoms are 'heavy' .. the energy binding them together to form molecules is small compared the amount an atom already 'contains'. So rock vapour weighs pretty much the same as rock.
Personally I have no idea what mass actually is beyond the equations it turns up in .. mainly Newton's Force=mass*acceleration and Einstein's E=mc^2.
(Today 02:41 AM)confused2 Wrote: [ -> ]From AI..
Quote:Only about 2% of the mass in an atom comes from the Higgs field coupling (intrinsic mass of quarks/electrons), while the remaining ~98% is the confined energy of gluon fields and quark movement.
So.. atoms are 'heavy' .. the energy binding them together to form molecules is small compared the amount an atom already 'contains'. So rock vapour weighs pretty much the same as rock.
Personally I have no idea what mass actually is beyond the equations it turns up in .. mainly Newton's Force=mass*acceleration and Einstein's E=mc^2.
Science defines mass as the amount of matter in something. And it defines matter as anything that has mass. It's pretty circular.
I have a hard though believing the cloud of molecules would be heavy at all. You do know what a cloud is? Have you ever seen a cloud of dust? Or a cloud of water droplets? These aren't even made of separate molecules but much larger particles and yet they float away.
Mass can be defined as inertia, how difficult it is to start or stop an object's motion. This is the sum of all the constituent particle energies and their kinetic and potential interactions. Cloud and dust molecules are very sparse and relatively slow, where subatomic particles are very densely packed and very active, contributing more kinetic energy to the mass/energy equivalence.
But the rock cloud wouldn't have hardly any of the inertia the solid rock did. And yet it has the same amount of molecules as the solid rock did. If not mass then where does inertia come from, and where does it go?
(Today 03:26 AM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]But the rock cloud wouldn't have hardly any of the inertia the solid rock did. And yet it has the same amount of molecules as the solid rock did. If not mass then where does inertia come from, and where does it go?
This is because density (stuff per volume) is directly related to inertia.
Turning the solid rock into a cloud of dust means that you've reduced the density. In effect, you've scattered the mass so that there's now space to push molecules individually (with enough space or freedom of motion, the interaction inertia from them colliding is negligible). So you can basically push an individual molecule at a time, where a solid rock requires pushing every molecule at once.
(Today 03:26 AM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]But the rock cloud wouldn't have hardly any of the inertia the solid rock did. And yet it has the same amount of molecules as the solid rock did. If not mass then where does inertia come from, and where does it go?
A bag full of rock weighs the same whether the rock is solid or vapour. Hydrogen balloons go up because a balloon full of hydrogen has less mass than a balloon full of air. Like Archimedes said .. "Loss of weight in water [or air] is equal to weight of water [or air] displaced"
Americans use ounces?
For a 1-megaton bomb, only about 2 ounces of mass is converted. Converting 2 oz of water to steam takes 'some' energy.. converting 2 oz of water to energy makes a very large crater.
Every day about a jillion tons of water evaporate from the surface of the sea .. that mass is then 'up there'. Elves collect that water vapor to form clouds and send it down as rain. All physics .. there's no magic involved.
Newton pointed out that the amount of force required to accelerate a mass is proportional to the mass being accelerated .. "Force=mass*acceleration".
Einstein pointed out that 'gravity' is equivalent to acceleration. With gravity at the surface of the Earth being fairly constant we can say with reasonable certainty that 8 oz of butter will require a certain amount of force to stop it falling on the floor. Kitchen scales use the force exerted by the butter (as it heads for the floor) to compress a spring .. the people that make Kitchen scales use Newton and Einstein's things to calculate how much the spring will be compressed by the butter and present the result on (usually) a dial. Edit. The takeaway point is that scales measure force (not mass). If you took the butter and scales to the moon where gravity is different the butter would have the same mass but the scales would be wrong. Edit2. The other takeaway point is that hydrogen balloons don't have no mass .. they just go up because the weight of the mass of the air displaced is greater than the the weight of the mass of the hydrogen. Or maybe elves prefer air to hydrogen and try to make the balloon go away. Could be either.