Re: electric charge

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@MINDSPRING.COM>]

At 20:06 -0500 12/21/01, Larry Cartwright wrote:
> Well, I've always assumed that a substance is a collection of elementary
> particles such as quarks, leptons and bosons.  But now I think I'm being
> told that the properties of such a substance can also be called a
> substance.  I believe that an aggregation of protons, neutrons and
> electrons is a substance; but I'm having trouble accepting that the
> charge property of their constituent Fermions is also a substance.
What is mass? And how does it differ from charge? Is mass a substance
or is it a property of matter? Of course mass, as we use the term is
a bit more complex that charge, because there are two properties of
matter that we have given the name mass to. One is the Inertial mass
that we put with the acceleration term in NSL, and the other is
gravitational mass, which is the property of matter than responds to
the gravitational interaction (that these two seem to be the same
thing is, as far as I can tell, an accident of nature--others may
have different ideas on this), just as charge is the property of
matter that responds to the electromagnetic interaction. Are either
of them substances? I think the answer is deep in Sarma's question.
If we define substances as things carrying charge and/or mass, then I
guess they are substances in the sense that they are carried around
on objects, and these objects all seem to have inertial mass. I think
Bill Beaty's discussion is also relevant. It depends on what scale we
are worried about, since the answer may well be different at
different scales.

Maybe we could just define gravitational mass as whatever it is that
causes gravitational fields, and charge as whatever it is that causes
electromagnetic fields, and then we could argue about what fields are.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto://haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

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