Thursday, July 29, 2010

A Theory Of Mass

Technology Review has a review of the mass question and presents a possible new theory.
The equivalence principle is one of the more fascinating ideas in modern science. It asserts that gravitational mass and inertial mass are identical. Einstein put it like this: the gravitational force we experience on Earth is identical to the force we would experience were we sitting in a spaceship accelerating at 1g. Newton might have said that the m in F=ma is the same as the ms in F=Gm1m2/r^2.

This seems eminently sensible. And yet it is no more than an assertion. Sure, we can measure the equivalence with ever increasing accuracy but there is nothing to stop us thinking that at some point the relationship will break down. Indeed several modifications to relativity predict that it will.

One important question is what quantum mechanics has to say on the matter. But physicists have so far been unable to use quantum theory as a lever to tease apart the behaviour of inertial and gravitational mass.

All that changes today with the extraordinary work of Endre Kajari at the University of Ulm in Germany and a few buddies. They show how it is possible to create situations in the quantum world in which the effects of inertial and gravitational mass must be different. In fact, they show that these differences can be arbitrarily large.

Their thinking begins by pointing out the important distinction between kinematics, which is concerned purely with motion not how it arises, and dynamics which focuses on the origin of motion. In the classical world, this has no bearing on the effects of inertial and gravitational mass.
There is way more. Go and read it all.

2 comments:

  1. That's an interesting article. I remember reading about Inertial dampening in Clarke's 3001 -- then he pointed to work done by some fellows called Haisch, Rueda and Puthoff. They've got against them that they reject Quantum theory in favour of a theory called Stochastic Electrodynamics, but apparently Haisch got a doctoral student of his to redo his argument using the QM formalism rather than Haisch's SED.

    On that front, however, I vaguely recall that they claimed they proved the Equivalence principle, and in fact that they derived F = ma, as well.

    Are you aware of those papers or should I dig up their references? I think most of them are in Arxiv...

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  2. Dig them up.

    Sorry about the delay. I have been busy with elections.

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