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really "quantization"



Now that he original thread has spun off in the (very interesting)
direction of "Is energy as physically real as charge?", I'll avoid energy
and simplify my original question by speaking only in terms of only charge
and mass.....

Taking quotes out of order....
Bill Larson says:

Incidentally I'm clearly missing something here. Why are they
distinguishing between mass & matter quantization?

They (H, R & W) aren't. It just happened that the quotes I chose used both
words, but I believe that they were intended to be synonyms.


Well I'd say the mechanism of charge and mass quantization is
"understood" and straightforward, i.e. the fact that fundamental
particles exist.
... The standard analogy is that
on a stairs height is quantized, which seems to apply to both cases
about equally well.

But charge comes only in multiples of a single fundamental amount, while as
far as I know the same is not true of mass.

I like the stair case analogy. It certainly applies to the allowed amount
of charge an abstract system could have. It also applies to how much
various *particular* kinds of matter a system could have. If we're talking
about Iron, you can only have an integer number of atoms.

However, I do not think that the staircase analogy applies very well to the
amount of *mass* a system can have. Even if you restrict your system to be
composed of (electrically) neutral species of a particular isotope of a
particular element, you have to ignore the fact that their binding energy
adds to the mass of the system. And claims like "mass is quantized" seem
to claim much wider scope than that.

--
--James McLean
jmclean@chem.ucsd.edu
post doc
UC San Diego, Chemistry