Aren’t you confusing relativistic mass with rest mass?
One interesting example of this is with quarks. We can speak theoretically of single quarks but in reality it is impossible to have an isolated quark, and here’s why. The force binding two quarks together increases with distance, much like a rubber band or a spring. As you stretch two quarks apart, the potential energy between them increases, until POP!, the potential energy materializes as two new quarks, so each quark you were trying to pull apart has become a quark pair.
No, when I’m using the word “mass”, I mean “rest mass” throughout. “Relativistic mass” is a silly concept that just makes everything more confusing.
That’s what I was going to say.
Apparently it’s what a bunch of us were going to say.
Qwertol, E=mc[sup]2[/sup] shows the equivalence of mass and energy - it isn’t a conversion factor, well it does that by necessity too but not exclusively.
Mass=Gravity…so as mass is lost, gravitational warp is lost
Except that mass is never lost.
If energy cannot be destroyed (conservation of energy), and mass and energy are related, then mass cannot be destroyed either.
If you used it to weigh its own price, would it actually be $12.990000000002 ?
In the news: “Using gravity to store energy”
It’s been done for ages - typically with hydroelectric systems. Pumped-storage hydroelectricity - Wikipedia
In the video it says it could be cheaper and more environmentally friendly than hydro power - no valley would need to be flooded and no dams would need to be built. The lifted material weighs twice as much as water and is lifted three times higher so it can store six times more energy for a unit of mass.
Only true if both conversions were 100% efficient, which they’re not. Friction is bastard here …
It might be more practical than water: That’s an engineering question. But the physics of it is well-understood and wholly uncontroversial, and completely unrelated to the previous topic of this thread.
All hydro-power is gravity-stored solar power. We just count on nature to do the initial storage and most of the concentration.
Even if it is not 100% efficient, we need more electricity at different times. This can be used to transfer electricity at one time where there is a surplus, to some fraction of that surplus at a time when there is a deficit.
Right, but the point is that you’ll get different amounts of friction with the pumped-hydro method and with the rail-car method, which might be a deciding factor in determining which one is more practical.
Plus in hot, dry climates a good chunk of your stored energy might evaporate from your high-level reservoir before you can use it.
(Either way, mechanically-stored energy has this lovely steampunk feel to it).
That’s a nice explanation of why we can’t produce quarks, but in itself doesn’t rule out lone quarks existing.
The Higgs particle has nothing to do with gravity. The W and Z bosons arise from spontaneous symmetry breaking in weak interactions. We’d thus expect them to be massless, being Goldstone bosons, but they’re actually quite massive. The Higgs mechanism explains how they have mass, and the discovery of the Higgs boson was huge experimental evidence for that mechanism. The effects of gravity are completely negligible at the quantum level (at least, under reasonable laboratory conditions for the foreseeable future), given the masses and timescales involved. (Special relativity is still hugely important, though.)
On that same topic: The Higgs is also suspected to be responsible for the mass of several other subatomic particles.
However:
The vast majority of the mass of planets, stars, and the other macroscopic objects we are familiar with has nothing at all to do with the Higgs. Most of the mass we’re familiar with is in protons and neutrons. A proton or a neutron is each composed of three quarks, and quarks might get their mass from the Higgs mechanism. But the mass of a proton or neutron is much greater than three times the mass of a quark. Most of the mass of protons and neutrons, and hence most of the mass we’re familiar with, is due to the binding energy of the Strong Force which holds the quarks together.
And gravity works equally on all mass, regardless of whether it’s due to binding energy (of any of the four fundamental forces), the Higgs mechanism, the Majorana mechanism, or any other source.