MASS EXPLAINED

MASS EXPLAINED

You know that energy is an intangible thing. You can’t hold energy in the palm of your hand. Because energy is to do with stress, which is the same as pressure, which is the same as negative tension, and you need a volume of stress to get the units right. Because stress is force per unit area and energy is force times distance.

You know that mass is a tangible thing. You can hold a thing in your hand and feel the mass of it. You even know that E=mc1, and that the intangible thing called energy can be used to make the tangible thing called mass. But you don’t know how. I’ll explain how.

The answer is all down to motion. Or the lack of it. You have to think in terms of momentum and inertia. You have to stop thinking that momentum is something that a mass has, because a thing can have momentum without having the thing you think is mass. Like a photon. You know this because you’ve read the physics. You also know this because you’ve felt it yourself, down on the beach, playing in the surf. Along comes a massive wave. You know it’s a travelling stress and you think it has no mass because it’s the water that has the mass. But the wave does have momentum, enough to knock you and your girlfriend flat on your back, laughing and screaming with salt water up your nose. You can’t grab hold of it, but it can grab hold of you. And realising this is the first step in grasping how intangible energy can become tangible mass.



You can get a better feel for this with a gyroscope. Waggle it back and forth. See how light it feels. Now wind the string round the spindle, grasp it tight, and pull. You pulled tension out, so you put energy in. Your gyroscope is now humming, maybe precessing a little. When you try to waggle it you can feel the angular momentum working against you. And you’re beginning to get a feel for mass.

Something that has a lot of mass is harder to move. Or harder to stop. Because it’s got a lot of inertia. Or a lot of momentum. And a lot of energy. And these things aren’t quite as different as you might think.

energy E=mc2
kinetic energy KE=½mv2
momentum p=mv
inertial mass=m

Consider a 10 kilogram cannonball travelling at 1 metre per second in space relative to you. Brace yourself, then apply some constant braking force by catching it in the midriff. Ooof, and you feel the energy. Kinetic energy is looking at this in terms of stopping distance, whilst momentum is looking at it in terms of stopping time. The momentum is conserved in the collision because the two objects shared a mutual force for the same period of time. The kinetic energy isn’t conserved, because some of the mass-in-motion was redirected into deformation and heat and probably bruises, all of which involve mass-in-motion, but scattered motion instead of tidy vector quantities of masses moving relative to you. Or you moving relative to them, because all the while you were never too sure whether it was you moving or the cannonball.

When we turn our attention from a cannonball to a photon, we have to express the energy and the momentum in a different way. There is no “mass”, so the energy is hf, and the momentum is hf/c. The h here is Planck’s constant of 6.63 x 10-34 Joule-seconds, and is an “action” which is a momentum multiplied by a distance. The f is the frequency per second, and our old friend c is distance over time, which converts a stopping-distance measure into a stopping-time measure. It’s just λ/c or wavelength over frequency, so you can also express the momentum as h/λ. And you can see how that momentum affects a mass via Compton scattering:



When a photon collides with a free electron the electron gets a bump and goes flying off at an angle, while the photon is similarly deflected and its wavelength is increased. The electron has gained some kinetic energy and the photon has lost some momentum. Or vice versa. Their velocity vectors have changed, as have their relative velocities. You can play “photons” at home with a strip of carpet or better still a rubber mat. Lift one end, grip it tight, and give it a big shake. You can see a wave travelling down the length of the rubber. It’s a travelling stress that rides on the tension it creates, and you can toss “electrons” with it, be they dollies or eggs. Hours of endless fun. Better than an egg in the microwave for four minutes.

Now imagine you’re the electron, only it’s you moving instead of the photon. Bump, and you’re sent flying off at an angle. It feels like you hit something solid instead of a volume of stressed space. Like a bad flight with so much turbulence it’s like riding over rocks. It would feel like the photon had inertia instead of momentum.

But the photon isn’t sitting in one place, and you can’t nail it down like you can nail down your rubber mat. So how do you keep that bump of momentum in the same place? There’s only one tool in the box. More of the same. Imagine you’ve got a couple of table tennis bats and you’re good at topspin. If you bat that photon just right you can change its direction and give it some energy. It’s called an Inverse Compton, like the picture above but with the arrows going the other way. Then you can hit it with the other bat to change its direction again. Repeat in rapid succession until you’ve got a kind of hexagon going, a miniature electromagnetic vortex.

Now keep batting away, but close your eyes, like you might close your eyes when you’re playing repulsion with a couple of magnets. You can feel something there between your bats. What you can feel is basically mass. You’ve made a mass. It isn’t a proper mass because if you stop batting your photon will be off like a shot. You need to bat faster and harder to get it down smaller and smaller. You’re packing more and more stress into a smaller and smaller volume. Then at 511keV, or 8.18 x 10-14 Joules, a funny thing happens. The volume will fit only a single wavelength, and the stress in your photon kind of tangles round itself like a moebius-strip bagel, spinning and rolling around itself like a smoke ring, and suddenly you’ve got yourself a self-sustaining vortex that you don’t have to bat any more. You’ve got yourself something that goes round twice to get back where it started, so it’s got spin ½. All the negative charge variation is on the outside, so it’s got negative charge. And most importantly, because it isn’t going anywhere, when you hit it, it’s you hitting the photon instead of the photon hitting you. It had momentum, and now its got inertia. It’s got mass. And you’ve got yourself an electron.



It’s wrapped into tight little loop, and you can’t undo it. When you give it a little tap with a bat you can still think in terms of the Compton picture. But now the whole thing is tied into a single wavelength and since it isn’t kept in place by some atomic nucleus acting like a tetherpole, you can’t stretch it with a little tap. All you get is the deflection. That deflection is a change in the photon velocity vector, it adds to all the velocity vectors in the moebius loop. It translates into motion, so the electron as a whole moves with respect to you.



You can do the same sort of thing to make a positron. It’s got the twist wrapped the other way, with the positive charge variation on the outside. But there’s no table tennis bats in particle physics. In practice you fire a mega-electron-volt photon at an atomic nucleus, whereupon it splits into two to create an electron and a positron at the same time for conservation of charge. The positron won’t last long because it will meet an electron, and the two will annihilate to create a pair of 511keV gamma-wave photons flying off in opposite directions. It’s like the electron is a twist in your fishing line and the positron is the mirror image twist. Slide them together, and voila, twang, gone.



Now we can visualise how the cannonball is a whole heap of whirling stress, a trundling bundle of energy. But is the cannonball moving or is it you moving, and what’s its mass? Is the rest mass calculated from the transverse velocity vector of those racing photons, or is it the relativistic mass of whatever path they trace through space? Take your pick, but I pick the latter. Which means in my eyes photons have momentum, and energy, and mass too. It’s all relative really, because we’re made out of these things, they’re like our light clocks. If you’re racing past me, yours look like this /\/\/\ to me and mine look the same to you. But our own look like this | to each of us. Our length contraction of 1/√(1-V2/C2) is relative, like our time dilation, and our momentum and energy, so I think our mass might as well be relative too.

Anyhow. That’s why a moving mass is rather like a spring. It looks like a spring stretched out rather than a spring compressed. That’s why a moving mass has something that looks like tension, sorry negative tension volume, that thing called energy. I will talk some more about these things. I will talk about electromagnetism and space, and whether energy is a property of space or makes it the thing that it is. And I will talk about particle physics and string theory, and matter.



But first, I need to try to explain a matter of some gravity...



Acknowledgements: thanks to J.G. Williamson and M.B. van der Mark for Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology? see http://members.chello.nl/~n.benschop/electron.pdf to Peter M Brown for his many mass papers on his excellent website http://www.geocities.com/physics_world/ , to Robert A Close for The Other Meaning of Special Relativity A New Interpretation of Special Relativity, to R F Norgan likewise see http://www.aethertheory.co.uk/pdfRFN/Aether_Why.pdf, to all the forum guys with their relevant posts and links, Wikipedia contributors, and to anybody who I’ve forgotten or whose pictures I’ve used. And Paul Dirac. Thanks guys.

If anybody can give me some feedback here I'd be pleased to hear it. Obviously I'll be sad if somebody points out some fatal flaw in this layman's explanation, but I'd rather hear it than not.

I'm enjoying it so far.

Kinetic energy is conserved. It is conserved due to all the reasons you specified it wasn't conserved. Conservation of energy specifies that energy cannot be created to destroyed, it only takes different forms, such as thermal energy, sound, and whatever else.

I think that's pretty much what Farsight was implying in his rendition. He's just refering to the transformation of kinetic energy into a number of different energy states. Energy is still conserved, but kinetic energy isn't.

This is correct insight and I'm using it too, occasionally. But the gyroscope must be massive too to be able to working by the way, you're description. Therefore the mechanism above just increases the inertia of gyroscope by introducing of energy (amplification), but it doesn't create the matter from totally nothing. We should find a different mechanism to create the mass at the very beginning of Universe.

This post has been edited by Zephir on Dec 28 2006, 10:13 PM

How about a 3D gyroscope experiencing precession along a seperate 4D axis in one direction? (bad description, but the best I can think of at the moment.)

It would create a ballooning and implosion effect as the spacetime is flung out by the torque before hitting a maximum and beginning implosion as a mirror effect to balance out the energy of the system, but should create the proper energy density and compressional states required to build mass out of energy.

It would have to be an already existing process and would throw the big bang out the window.

Thanks for the feedback guys. Oomchu, I'll change the essay to clarify the point about energy conservation. Zephir/Solid: I can't see much difference between a massless thing like a photon moving to me and me feeling its momentum, and me moving to it and feeling its inertia. If there is some vital "origin of mass" issue that precludes this, please can you explain.

This post has been edited by Farsight on Dec 29 2006, 01:29 PM

Does anybody know anything about this R L Collins guy or Gravity Probe B?

http://www.mass-metricgravity.net/

"The mass-metric relativity (MMR), developed here, holds that the shrinkage exists but is isotropic. This means that a standard meter stick has its maximum length when it does not move relative to the observer, and that that observer must infer that a moving meter stick has shrunk isotropically. Two observers, one moving at constant speed relative to the other, must each infer that the metric of the other has shrunk.

This problem does not exist, if we hold that mass is constant. Many physicists, perhaps most, deny that speed really increases mass. They agree that one must use "relativistic" mass, which increases with speed, in order to design accelerators which accelerate particles to high speeds. But this is somehow not really mass, mass which is presumed constant and which is intrinsic to each body. In physics, as elsewhere, assumptions lead to consequences... "

I can see how you could construct an electron that way.

What would a proton look like? Or a neutron (and all the other particles)?

I have also read Gabriel LaFreniere's site on particle wave theory on http://www.glafreniere.com/

He suggests that protons are basically made of electrons...

Are there other ideas on this?

Chantal

I'm not sure. Tighter knots maybe with more loops, with more energy in one place and therefore mass. They'll be in here somewhere. It's where I got that last pretty picture from.

http://knotplot.com/

This is rather like LaFreniere. Maybe they're related.

http://www.blazelabs.com/f-u-dual.asp

I can't say I'm keen on this interference model myself.

This post has been edited by Farsight on Jan 1 2007, 05:03 PM

A free neutron decays, or "comes undone", and we're left with a proton, an electron, and a bit of er... twang called an electron antineutrino. Hmmn. I guess you can see why this essay is called "Mass Explained" rather than "Particle Physics Explained".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_neutron

Good write up. Great diagrams.

As a writer myself, the only criticism comes from writing textbooks.
Using too many or even more than one 'analogy' gets confusing to the reader.
eg bats, string, carpet, eggs etc
Too distracting.

This post has been edited by B_Sharp on Jan 1 2007, 06:40 PM

Mass appears when bubble type vortex breakdown structure is created out of aether , vacuum or whatever You call it. Mass is a result of a certain resonance , and it is by no means locally stable or conserved; It can appear from and disappear into vacuum or aether.

There are 4 types of such relatively stable structures which may have any lifetimes depending on circumstances of their creation

vortex - creates space - line
spiral - light - surface
bubble -mass - volume
double helix -life

Their interaction plus aether itself creates all there is. Each case of interaction, change creates a reference moment- time.

It is all fundamentally discrete. It is more complicated than 4 dimensional fluid because it is 2 + 1,42 dimensional fluid if You wish. The fractal dimension is exactly created by rotating vortex breakdown structures interacting with already existing structures via threads of aether.

I have somewhere here also explained how it works intuitively and given fractal formula for alpha which follows from this model.

The fractal dimension of angular momentum can be imagined like this: If we add rotating mass of electron to rotating sphere at some point of surface, it will create a local angular moment ; if we imagine that as a result, after some time, there would be similar angular moment at the exactly opposite side of sphere, (created by falaco soliton from the place of first contact) then total monet of sphere would not change; however, its surface will contain 2 small extra moments. These are fractals, and , even with constant total moment, the fractal moments of such sphere surface can add up to a very large number.

It would be easier to imagine if thinking about rotating sphere water sphere in the water.

The maximum number of those fractal moments will depend on the number of phase states- how many small angular moments totally is possible to place on the surface of the sphere.

When all these phase states would be filled, total fractal moment will reach its maximum and system will explode=die because it will not be able to accumulate the last electron without destroying its structure.

Thanks B Sharp. I guess I sometimes butter those analogies on a bit thick. I'll watch out for it.

Ivars, sorry I have trouble getting my head round that.