I have found all the discussion under this thread interesting, but I am
going to get a little rowdy and accuse list participants of getting off
track and not dealing with the original question. I am also going to
accuse participants of getting bogged down in the details and not seeing
the forest because of the trees.
Several times I have been quoted as asking "And what exactly does E=mc2
mean? Doesn't it mean mass and energy are
equivalent?"
This has repetitively been shot down or upheld depending on whether the
mass refers to rest mass. Well of course it does. What was the
original discussion all about? In the beginning I was responding to
Leigh Palmer's accusation that I was committing heresy by teaching my
students that matter is bound energy or localized energy. Thus, I was
talking about the stuff you hold in your hand. I believe that only
makes sense in my frame, thus I am asking about the rest mass. What are
you holding when you have a 1-kg mass in your hand. A hunk of brass? A
bunch of atoms? A bunch of protons and neutrons and electrons? A bunch
of localized energy?
Is that last question heresy?
I am no longer in the stage of life when I was doing cutting-edge
nuclear research, so things might have changed. However, during the
time I was more active, we never spoke of mass in kilograms. We always
spoke in keV, MeV, or GeV. The mass of an electron/positron was 511
keV. The mass of a proton about 930 MeV. And so forth. People who
were viewing "transient particles" often spoke of seeing resonances in
energy. Has my 25-year-old language fallen out of fashion?
In addition to the above, I was also asking... if not energy, where did
matter come from in the beginning? One of the responses came from David
Bowman who said, "From the vacuum (as it transitioned to a lower
potential energy
value and as it acquired a spontaneous nonzero background value of the
Higgs field)."
Is that statement okay? Because if it is, that's one of the points I
was trying to make. That the stuff we call matter today actually
started out as energy. Of course some people think it might have been
matter before that, but the previous universe collapsed into a
singularity and then "big-banged" all over again.
I am not a theoretician, and I especially don't have much background in
cosmology. So that's why I am asking the question again. Is it heresy
to teach that REST mass and energy are equivalent, and this would imply
that one way to view mass is as localized energy? Is it in vogue or out
of vogue to view that the matter in the universe arose from energy?
Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D.
Professor of Physics and Chemistry
Bluffton University
Bluffton, OH 45817
(419)-358-3270
edmiston@bluffton.edu