Re: Is Mass A Fundamental Quantity?

Uncle Al wrote: 
Mark Fergerson wrote:

  I haven't posted a really stupid question in a while. I started
worrying about this after a conversation with Don Shead, so slap me
as hard as seems appropriate.

  The other kinds of "charge", color and electroweak, are quantized
which makes quantizing their fields much easier (QED, QCD), but
AFAIK nobody knows for sure if mass can even _be_ quantized, and
gravitation in general looks unquantizable.

  OTOH we say that all energy gravitates, so gravitation may just
be a consequence of the energy tied up in the fields of the "other
two" charges on an object, and what we call mass is an "emergent
illusion".

  This means that inertia is also an "emergent" property of color
and electroweak fields.

Anybody got the Two-By-Four of Obvious Disproof handy? 

It is not wholly impossible that mass as such is not a fundamental
anything.  It doesn't appear as such in General Relativity or
M-theory.  All mass of all kinds - chemical composition, binding
energy, spinning, magnetic, superconducting... hyperspinning
hypermagnetized hyperbound neutronium (pulsars) - empirically and
observationally all fall identically in vacuum within experimental
error.  Matter is entirely fungible.


  Damn. Apparently it wasn't as stupid a question as I thought.

<snip stuff I've already sweated over>

(The full parity Eotvos experiment will give the straight skinny on
incommensurate mass geometry in the fall.)

I was going to mention that both the electroweak and color forces are parity-sensitive but couldn't figure out how to work it in; thanks. I was wondering; is it planned to test right-handed vs. left-handed, then left vs left, then right vs. right? I ask because ISTM all three cases should give slightly different results; since we're apparently fairly certain that spacetime itself is left-handed, one of the three ought to show a larger signal.

That all primary physical standards *except mass* can be created as
abstract processes reproducible to a very large number of decimal
places is interesting. The primary standard for mass is a lump of 10%
iridium-platinum alloy in nested glass bell jars outside Paris. Something is wrong.

Oh, ***. I did not intend to start a fight between you and Old Man...

All ya gotta do is propose a viable alternative.

Best I can manage is the above _totally unsupported guess_ that the other two charges (and their fields) attract each other, but the parity effects are swamped out at ranges larger than a few Fermis unless you specifically look for them.

Dumb Donny ShitHEAD
psychotically demands the system of units makes a difference.  That is
less than pathetic.

Well, that's why I asked the question in the first place. Quantized units for spin, color and charge present themselves from Nature, but not mass.

  Mark L. Fergerson

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