Conversation:

Entry: Mass – How heavy is stuff? - A87755647
Author: the_jon_m - bluesman of the parish - U204330

please review / accept

I think that this is a wonderful entry. It made a dry subject fun and understandable and it is just what the guide should be doing.

Is it worth mentioning that at first a kilogram was the weight of 1 L of water? We use this quite a lot in medicine, if someone has fluid retention and we need to give them powerful drugs to make them wee, we measure their weight every day to make sure we don't take off too much fluid.

Another excellent article. One minor thing I noticed is perhaps re-write "Because the we don’t use", presumably deleting the 'the'. You could also link to a few related articles, such as:

A9914466 Atomic Mass and the Atomic Mass Unit (amu)
A6672963 Atoms and Atomic Structure
A471476 Units of Measurement
A565832 Gravity
A287381 Relativity
A313282 Shopping Trolleys

Another enjoyable read!

<BB<

The least arbitrary standard of measurement for mass I can think of is the elementary quantum discovered by Max Planck, a unit of energy, manifesting itself in either of two forms, spin and momentum.

For a conveniently large mass, one might go to the mass equivalency of the mole squared of elementary quanta, which is near the rest mass of the neutron.

The rest mass of the neutron is short of the mass equivalency of the mole squared of elementary quanta in an amount like the spin and momentum statistics of the elementary graviton (4 spin per unit of momentum) multiplied the elementary quantum equivalency of the electron, the 'missing mass' probably manifested in bonding energy, just as bonding energies make discrepancies in isotopic masses of the chemical elements.

The standard of measurement all the smart star travelling species must be using all through the cosmos, for the sake of compatibility with the measures of other high tech civilizations.

I often wonder why, at the metric convention, they didn't simply make the standard Earth gravity arbitrarily equal to 10 meters per second squared and work out all the other standard metric measures from that.

That would still be a geocentric standard, but a dynamic one as distinct from the static ~ 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the north pole that provides the original concept of the standard meter.

Curiously, the classical Greeks of the age of Pericles used that same standard when designing the bays on the sides of the Parthenon above the colonnade and below the eaves.

Damn, someone beat me to saying that a litre of water is a kg

Or i suppose 1000cm cubed is more accurate because you're measuring off a metre, which is derived as the distance travelled by light in a certain time i believe (but a metre was also measured by a block of metal in paris for a stage, except whenever it heated and shrunk its length would change)

I found a couple of typos and minute grammatical blips:

but everything else gets more heavier.

You don't need "more" with the comparative "heavier".

The whole thing was so nice to read that I won't mention the others, as they will easily be found by the subed.

This is an amazing piece and, for people with no more than "O" level physics, like me, does join up some of the dots. I'm not sure if the title is not misleading, though. I was expecting to find a simple clarification of the difference between weight and mass, and found myself taken by the hand into the world of quantum physics and God particles.

There were a few other colliders, I might add. In fact, my understanding of what was going on in this Entry was facilitated by my having been to one near where I live. They work together with the Tevatron in Illinois.

http://www.gsi.de/portrait/ueberblick_e.html

I'm only pointing this out because it's in the 'pedantic' section:



Gravity actually works both ways. You are also pulling the Earth towards you, just not by very much. If you were heavier than the Earth (and I've seen a few BBC3 documentaries on people who are), then you would not be able to say what you did.

Good entry, but clearly not proof-read, so I'm going to nitpick a little:

"a large man is being to have a larger foot" - 'going', not 'being'
"Except is doesn’t." - 'it'
"probably replaced to the mass of a certain number of atoms" - 'by', not 'to'
"one kilogram is the meant to be mass of one litre of water" - remove the 'the'
"the amount of energy an electron has if it was accelerated" - don't mix tenses - 'if it is accelerated'

"It happens that Einstein came up with it," - so Einstein created the universe, eh? Perhaps 'discovered'.

I also have to point out that the muddy field isn't a good paradigm. A particle in a Higgs Boson field doesn't accumulate bosons, but is instead at any one time interacting with a given number of them. The example of an important person trying to traverse a cocktail party and being surrounded by a given number of lackeys at any given time holds up better, imho.

Splendid entry. I'm going to pick on one sentence from near the beginning:

>>matter is everything that forms objects from dust and snot to badgers and stars.<<

and suggest that the word snot is going to make a lot of people change channels before they've even looked at the rest of it.

I personally find it entertaining, but i can definetely see your point - maybe it can be changed to chocolate?

Though people might not want to see how much chocolate they eat

Maybe you could add a little thing about why the Higgs particle is often called the "god particle"? Leon Ledermann said in his book "The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?" that the publishers of the book would not approve of the words "The Goddamn Particle" on the cover of a serious book.*

Y.

*Thanks for the web for such information

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Jolly good!

Only 2 weeks, not 2 years for this one

<BB<

Jon, would you like to comment on Tufty's cocktail party analogy?

OK, since you're not around, I've sub-edited this. If you don't like what I've done, just give me a call. See you on the Front Page.