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Re: really "quantization"



Chuck Britton wrote:

At 10:10 AM -0400 5/13/98, James W. Wheeler wrote:
Mass quantization should be observed along with space quantization
(if you
believe the GUTS folks), but only at a level of the Planck length
(10^-33
cm). The reason/mechanism producing the observed masses of particles
is
still not established.

And will someone please remind us what the value of the Planck Mass
is? :-)

The Planck mass is sqrt(h-bar c / G)
= 1.22 x 10^19 Gev = 2.18 x 10^-8 kg, and I don't think that it has
anything to do with mass quantization as we are discussing it here. It
sets the mass *excitation* scale for particles whose spatial dimensions
are controlled by gravitational effects at the Planck scale and is
sometimes regarded as the natural mass scale of a particle if there is
no symmetry requiring the particle's mass to be zero or nearly zero.

--
Maurice Barnhill, mvb@udel.edu
http://www.physics.udel.edu/~barnhill/
Physics Dept., University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716