Does Mass Exist?

[John FX]

Mass is as real as anything else. Mind you even that is up for debate in some circles.

[monstah]

Insert obligatory comic.

http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1797

(the engineer is clearly playing KSP, by the way.)

[Darnok]

17 minutes ago, peadar1987 said:

4. They do have different properties. Different charge, for one. Different shape. Different chemical properties. But they have almost identical inertia, which means that resistance to acceleration is not based on geometric parameters.

 

4. Not purely on geometric parameters, but also on energy it can store.
Even using your way and measuring inertia you should have case where inertia of large structure + low energy = inertia of small structure + large energy. So mass wouldn't be needed, instead of we would have something like capacity for energy + geometric structure.
 

[sevenperforce]

8 minutes ago, Darnok said:

So I can say that 1000 atoms of gold is going to create exact same force no matter in what shape I will forge them... but that doesn't prove existence of mass as source of that force. You can say it does, but I can say it proves that space is interacting with those atoms.

Who said anything about mass being a source of force? Your conception of reality and experimentation is so far broken that I'm not sure it can be fixed.

1,000 atoms of gold will experience the same constant acceleration in response to a given quantity of constant external force regardless of their shape. Incidentally, this will also be the same constant acceleration that 3,527 iron atoms or 12,311 oxygen atoms or 807 plutonium atoms or 28,380 lithium atoms would experience in response to the same constant external force, also regardless of their shape.

Take an object. Apply an external force to it (an external force is a force from outside it, if that helps you). Measure the object's acceleration. The object is not "creating" force or any such nonsense.

18 minutes ago, Darnok said:

I can measure object size using even simple rope (accuracy of such measurement is not important it is only example, you can use rope made of single layer of atoms if you wish).

Is your writing horrible because you're intentionally trolling, or because English is not your first language?

Like I said, if you claim you can measure an object's size using a length of rope, then you need to be able to prove that the length of the rope is constant along each axis. Making it a rope comprising a single chain of atoms won't help you, because you'd need to show that the atoms are all exactly as tall as they are wide, and you can't do that without a way of measuring them. Which would be assuming the thing you're trying to prove.

20 minutes ago, Darnok said:

1 hour ago, sevenperforce said:

You want evidence for the existence of mass? You want to know how to measure it independent of density? No problem. Place any object on a frictionless surface and measure the amount of force required to accelerate it at a rate of 1 m/s². The amount of force it took in Newtons is the mass of the object in kilograms.

So what is Newton? wiki says it is "Derived units", so please do not use it. If you want to prove that mass exists, because to use Newton you need mass first.

Well, you don't actually understand what derived units are. But that's not important. Because you can use dynes or pounds or sthènes or kips or any other unit of force. Although we often describe force relative to mass (because that's what people are familiar with), force does not depend on mass. For example, as peadar pointed out, the force required to physically compress a spring is independent of that spring's mass/weight/size/gravity.

Go to the nearest wall and push on it as hard as you can. You are now exerting a certain force; let us call this force a Darnok-push. Someone twice as strong as you could presumably exert 2 Darnok-push units of force; someone half as strong as you could presumably exert 0.5 Darnok-push units of force.

Go and push an object on a frictionless surface with 1 Darnok-push of force, and measure its acceleration. This will allow you to calculate its mass.

29 minutes ago, Darnok said:

1 hour ago, sevenperforce said:

No, it would not give you the same results. If you conduct the experiment with the objects suspended in liquid, you will see a damping factor enter the equation, yielding different results. 

Depends on "liquid", it was example like with apples.

Nope, it doesn't depend on the liquid. Any liquid you suspend the system in will introduce a damping factor. This is not the same at all.

[PB666]

21 hours ago, Darnok said:

I think OP misunderstood my words in other thread...

Mass is only our interpretation of force that occurs between object and Earth. I said that mass is only a name, invented by humans, for law of nature and that law of nature exists, but mass as name and as property of objects may be misinterpret and may not exist.
We still have no idea what is source of mass or I missed something?

i can help you out here, there is everything (a word) in the Universe (another name or word). We (another name or word) propogate through space-time (yada-yada).

What separates humans from other species is that we create abstractions of the physical and non-physical world. So in this sense mass may or may not exist.

Newton was partially wrong, not completely, he realized that gravity was pushing back on earth, in reality an object in flight was not accelerating toward anything, it was in a non-inertial reference frame. But if we say that the surface of the earth is a reference frame, then anything that changes its velocity in that direction is accelerating. Einstien made the essential point that it is impossible to distinguish acceleration in a centrifuge from acceleration of gravity relative to a non-inertial reference frame. So yes, gravity is a faux-force, when we think about the surface of the Earth we should be keenly aware that electron densities of 6400 km of iron are pushing up ever higher layers of dirt, the bottom of your tennis shoes to constantly force us upward so that you don't fall in. This in turn creates(ed) alot of power at the center of the earth, and thus allows the core to melt, and spin and thus gives us a magnetic field.

However if we remove newtons wrongness and accept gravity as a faux force created by the warping of space-time, and we remove earth and atmosphere from our feet then we no-longer have a problem. If I am holding a basket ball and I throw that basket ball, it will still travel forward and i will travel backward, since my feet are no free to drift M_me * dV_me = Mbball * dV_bball

Now, lets say we zap all the energy out of something. Iron is a good example we can cool it to very low temperature. Its got a little energy from electron potentials in its unfilled outer shell electrons which is really only an issue in gases and on the surface. First the disclaimer, only a small percent of the mass of an iron is, in fact, massive by its very nature, the quarks however are held together by binding energy known as gluons, and gluons energy adds mass to helium. This is only relevant if we slam a helium into an anti-helium, once the quarks poof, the gluons  become unstable and vice versa. There are also weak and strong force in the nucleus and this adds a little more mass. So there is a potential that we can violate Newton laws of conservation and convert mass to energy, but I should also state that these photons released can convert energy in the form of photons back into mass, just not the same mass. At this cold temperature and at mass densities Schwartfield dynamics that bosonic helium is really really stable.

So we have to state that the low energy state of Iron balls that are slowly flying toward each other in our supercooled universe will collide, that collision will result in a change of inertia of the individual balls, and therefore this low energy state has mass. If the collision is elastic the balls will reflect off each other like billiard balls and if not they will heat up. Iron exists because mass is repeatedly cooked in high density state releasing binding energy of the nuclei until this low energy state is achieved.

So what helps you out in this understanding of mass is that from the initial state of the Universe, mass is more like you are thinking, that is because the state of the universe favors dissociated fields of energy, each field is so energetic, the field itself is trying to achieve disorder but the state of the universe, high density, is much more ordered than the state it would like to be in, diffuse. Mass that forms is also high density and photons are highest energy and between the two matter cannot exist for any length of time. The key here is that the energy density in the premass universe is astronomically higher than it is now, its not a familiar state to use, its hotter even than the interior of an H-bomb at the point of maximum pressure (which is driven by x-rays). The energy of the early universe is very far into the high energy gamma range.

Atoms appear to be an ordered state, just like life, but that ordered state is compatible with a greater feeding toward disorder in the entire system. The high energy photons and exotic particles eventually settled into stable things, like atoms, that could persist and confine energy. The energy confinement of the atom is a response to the super high density of energy of the initial universe, lots of short lived energetic particles all trying to seek entropy at once simply does not cool things down because they are constantly scattering each other, shoving energy into atoms is a very nice way of cooling the universe because CMBR tells us, this is a way for photons to spread out. So this initial problem of pair production and annihilation eventually feeds a state of atom production and photon stability (transits) and it allows the spreading of energy. IOW, while mass is not the absolutely most favored state once stable atoms form, they tuck interaction energy into confined space allowing many other forms of energy to spread more rapidly. This I argue that the universe while spreading has a natural outer boundary of photons and particles which is not in our visible space. Thermodynamics of mass suggests that universe should have unbounded limits it can feed into. Some have suggest with the formation of space-time the higgs boson spread at c, with no differential mass to warp it propogates the outer limits of the universe, the edge of an expanding sphere. Even without this inflation of the universe and expansion within the inflation has also created a transitional energy state.  

Mass therefore a heat sink for energy when energy is too high to be dealt effectively by other means.

But for mass to be a heat sink, it has to give up its ability to propogate itself as a linear oscillating field at c, otherwise that energy just flows at c and interferes with the ability for other energy to flow out (opaque), and the higgs boson does this. Part of what makes mass confine is the gluon quark interactions that form the proton and neutron. protons then interact with electron, and this finally removes the opaqueness and photons now propogate more freely in space.

So as we see the phase transition from the hot to colder universe causes a phase transition to a proportionally massive universe (mass being only s small part of the energy). When the universe is exceptionally hot, but not apostatically hot, mass formation is somewhat favored. But as mass congregates and cools into highly condensed states (like black holes) that instability and different state favors energy. Dilution is a form of chaos. 

The next step is why is mass still allowed given the universe is cooler. The answer is that as long as mass continues to spread uniformly in space, then its stability protects it from degradation, but if mass collects then its state no longer is favored and a consequence is hawkings radiation from a black hole.

Mass = a place to tuck energy when energetic field densities are exceptionally high.

Other field Energy = a place to release tucked energy when tucked energy density is exceptionally high.

Mass is therefore a legacy state, which means it also predates you, language and our semantics about it, it is a pre-existing substate in an energetic universe. By the fact that we communicate implies that the universe is energetic, thats its initial state, infinite energy density. There is nothing we can say, write or alter that stops matter from existing, the tools we use to describe energy states (i.e. the higgs boson, the photon, the neutrino, gluons, w-bosons, etc) also describe matter as an aggregate energy state for which we can create properties such as normal or exotic, atomic number, atomic mass, etc. You can't actually define mass out of existence, you can eliminate the word and change the definition, but that would only make mass less useful as an abstraction.

Particular useful measures of the the universe can be found here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units,

You should note that in each scale there is a mass unit, there is a length unit and there is a time unit. Despite the fact that space-time tells us that these measures are not a relevant as we think. Within our comoving space time they are critically relevant to physics.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[pincushionman]

At the risk of sounding daft (as I am not knowledgeable (very) in general relativity), I was under the impression that the existence of mass was one of the axioms and therefore not, technically, deriveable from the theory (the existence of spacetime as a manifold being another one). Inertia and gravitation are consequences of mass.

That doesn't mean you can't prove it, though. The theory states that "IF mass exists, THEN these predictions…" And all predictions thus far are consistent with observations except edge cases involving quantum length scales.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong (I'm reaching even further into the bag of things I don't fully understand), but the existence of mass is not an axiom of quantum mechanics, and it really is a consequence of the interaction of fields (in particular, the Higgs). And has been observed to be consistent with said theory, again except for edge cases.

…But in either case, the existence of mass is well-established in both theories, as well as in the simpler Newtonian theory. The success of all these makes a theory without mass a pretty tough sell. Exactly what mass is is still a matter of debate, but that is a far cry from questioning its existence.

Now, one could conceivably refactor GR so that mass is not an aciom but a consequence, but you'd need another thing to take its place as the axiom, and there's little reason to even try to do that. Occam's Razor and all that.

Edited February 23, 2016 by pincushionman

[sevenperforce]

The existence of mass as some independent entity could be considered an axiom, but the existence of mass as a directly measurable property of matter is not really a matter of debate anymore.