home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Path: sparky!uunet!ogicse!das-news.harvard.edu!husc-news.harvard.edu!husc8!mcirvin
- From: mcirvin@husc8.harvard.edu (Mcirvin)
- Newsgroups: sci.physics
- Subject: Re: Converting the masses
- Message-ID: <mcirvin.711994597@husc8>
- Date: 24 Jul 92 16:16:37 GMT
- Article-I.D.: husc8.mcirvin.711994597
- References: <n0596t@ofa123.fidonet.org> <mcirvin.711489157@husc10>
- <9868@sun13.scri.fsu.edu> <1992Jul22.193837.18095@sfu.ca> <mcirvin.711904014@husc8> <24826@dog.ee.lbl.gov>
- Distribution: na
- Lines: 24
- Nntp-Posting-Host: husc8.harvard.edu
-
- sichase@csa2.lbl.gov (SCOTT I CHASE) writes:
-
- >In article <mcirvin.711904014@husc8>, mcirvin@husc8.harvard.edu (Mcirvin) writes...
- >>
- >>Actually, neither definition of mass would be temperature-independent,
- >>if you define it for the whole lump of coal. When you raise the
- >>temperature, the energy in the rest frame increases! The sum of
- >>the masses of all the particles is perhaps temperature-independent,
- >>but as you complained before, that's not the mass of the lump.
-
- >But inertial mass *can* be termperature dependent.
- [description of experiments with hydrogen]
-
- That's what I said... Oh, you mean of the individual constituents of
- the object. Yes, I imagine so; I was talking about the idealized
- picture of atoms as billiard balls, not the situation in which they
- have internal degrees of freedom.
-
- This just illustrates further the fact that *no* reasonable definition
- of mass, "rest" or "relativistic," is temperature-independent for an
- object with internal structure.
-
- --
- Matt McIrvin mcirvin@husc.harvard.edu Long live short .sigs
-