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'Mass' is a fundamental concept in physics, roughly corresponding to the intuitive idea of "how much matter there is in an object?". Mass is a central concept of classical mechanics and related subjects, and there are several definitions of mass within the framework of relativistic kinematics (see mass in special relativity and mass in General Relativity). In the theory of relativity, the quantity invariant mass, which in concept is close to the classical idea of mass, does not vary between single observers in different reference frames.
In informal everyday usage, mass is more commonly referred to as 'weight', but in physics and engineering, weight strictly means the size of the gravitational pull on the object; that is, how heavy it is, measured in units of force. In everyday situations, the mass of an object is proportional to its weight, which usually makes it unproblematic to use the same word for both. Distinguishing them becomes important for measurements with a precision better than a few percent, due to slight differences in the strength of the Earth's gravitational field at different places, and is essential when one considers places far from the surface of the Earth, such as in space or on other planets.

Contents

Units of mass

Inertial and gravitational mass

Inertial mass

Gravitational mass

Equivalence of inertial and gravitational masses

Relationship between mass and energy

References

See also

External links

Units of mass

In the SI system of units, mass is measured in kilograms. Many other units of mass are also employed, such as: grams (g), tonnes, pounds, ounces, long and short tons, quintals, slugs, atomic mass units, Planck masses, solar masses, and eV/''c''².
Because of the relativistic connection between mass and energy (see mass in special relativity), it is possible to use any unit of energy as a unit of mass instead. For example, the eV energy unit based on the electron volt is normally used as a unit of mass (roughly 1.783 × 10^-36 kg) in particle physics. A mass can sometimes also be expressed in terms of inverse length. Here one identifies the mass of a particle with its inverse Compton wavelength ( kg).
Because the gravitational acceleration ('g') is approximately constant on the surface of the Earth, and also because mass balances do not depend on the local value of g, a unit like the pound is often used to measure ''either'' mass or force (e.g. weight). When the pound is used as a measure of mass (where 'g' does not enter in), it is officially in the English system defined in terms of the kg, as 1 lb = 0.453 592 37 kg (see force). In this case the English system unit of force is the poundal. By contrast, when the pound is used as the unit of force, the English unit of mass is the slug (mass).
For more information on the different units of mass, see Orders of magnitude (mass).

Inertial and gravitational mass

One may distinguish conceptually between three types of ''mass'' or properties called ''mass'':^[1]

★ ''Inertial mass'' is a measure of an object's resistance to changing its state of motion when a force is applied. An object with small inertial mass changes its motion more readily, and an object with large inertial mass does so less readily.

★ ''Passive gravitational mass'' is a measure of the strength of an object's interaction with a gravitational field. Within the same gravitational field, an object with a smaller passive gravitational mass experiences a smaller force than an object with a larger passive gravitational mass.

★ ''Active gravitational mass'' is a measure of the strength of the gravitational field due to a particular object. For example, the gravitational field that one experiences on the Moon is weaker than that of the Earth because the Moon has less active gravitational mass.
Although inertial mass, passive gravitational mass and active gravitational mass are conceptually distinct, no experiment has ever unambiguously demonstrated any difference between them.
In classical mechanics, Newton's third law implies that active and passive gravitational mass must always be identical (or at least proportional), but the classical theory offers no compelling reason why the gravitational mass has to equal the intertial mass. That it does is merely an empirical fact.
Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity starting from the assumption that this correspondence between inertial and (passive) gravitational mass is not accidental: that no experiment will ever detect a difference between them (the weak version of the equivalence principle) because "acceleration" (due to an external force) and "weight" (due to a gravitational field) are themselves identical. However, in the resulting theory gravitation is not a force and thus not subject to Newton's third law, so "the equality of inertial and ''active'' gravitational mass [...] remains as puzzling as ever".^[2]

Inertial mass

''Inertial mass'' is the mass of an object measured by its resistance to acceleration.
To understand what the inertial mass of a body is, one begins with classical mechanics and Newton's Laws of Motion. Later on, we will see how our classical definition of mass must be altered if we take into consideration the theory of special relativity, which is more accurate than classical mechanics. However, the implications of special relativity will not change the meaning of "mass" in any essential way.
According to Newton's second law, we say that a body has a mass ''m'' if, at any instant of time, it obeys the equation of motion
:
where ''f'' is the force acting on the body and ''v'' is its velocity. For the moment, we will put aside the question of what "force acting on the body" actually means.
Now, suppose that the mass of the body in question is a constant. This assumption, known as the conservation of mass, rests on the ideas that (i) mass is a measure of the amount of matter contained in a body, and (ii) matter can never be created or destroyed, only split up or recombined. These are very reasonable assumptions for everyday objects, though, as we will see, mass can indeed by created or destroyed when we take special relativity into account. Another point to note is that, even in classical mechanics, it is sometimes useful to treat the mass of an object as changing with time. For example, the mass of a rocket decreases as the rocket fires. However, this is an ''approximation'', based on ignoring pieces of matter which enter or leave the system. In the case of the rocket, these pieces correspond to the ejected propellant; if we were to measure the total mass of the rocket and its propellant, we would find that it is conserved.
When the mass of a body is constant, Newton's second law becomes
:
where ''a'' denotes the acceleration of the body.
This equation illustrates how mass relates to the inertia of a body. Consider two objects with different masses. If we apply an identical force to each, the object with a bigger mass will experience a smaller acceleration, and the object with a smaller mass will experience a bigger acceleration. We might say that the larger mass exerts a greater "resistance" to changing its state of motion in response to the force.
However, this notion of applying "identical" forces to different objects brings us back to the fact that we have not really defined what a force is. We can sidestep this difficulty with the help of Newton's third law, which states that if one object exerts a force on a second object, it will experience an equal and opposite force. To be precise, suppose we have two objects A and B, with constant inertial masses ''m_A'' and ''m_B''. We isolate the two objects from all other physical influences, so that the only forces present are the force exerted on A by B, which we denote ''f_AB'', and the force exerted on B by A, which we denote ''f_BA''. As we have seen, Newton's second law states that
:$f\_\{AB\}\; =\; m\_A\; a\_A\; ,$ and $f\_\{BA\}\; =\; m\_B\; a\_B\; ,$
where ''a_A'' and ''a_B'' are the accelerations of A and B respectively. Suppose that these accelerations are non-zero, so that the forces between the two objects are non-zero. This occurs, for example, if the two objects are in the process of colliding with one another. Newton's third law then states that
:$f\_\{AB\}\; =\; -\; f\_\{BA\}.\; ,$
Substituting this into the previous equations, we obtain
:
Note that our requirement that ''a_A'' be non-zero ensures that the fraction is well-defined.
This is, in principle, how we would measure the inertial mass of an object. We choose a "reference" object and define its mass ''m_B'' as (say) 1 kilogram. Then we can measure the mass of every other object in the universe by colliding it with the reference object and measuring the accelerations.

Gravitational mass

''Gravitational mass'' is the mass of an object measured using the effect of a gravitational field on the object.
The concept of gravitational mass rests on Newton's law of gravitation. Let us suppose we have two objects A and B, separated by a distance |'r'_AB|. The law of gravitation states that if A and B have gravitational masses ''M_A'' and ''M_B'' respectively, then each object exerts a gravitational force on the other, of magnitude
:$|f|\; =\; \{G\; M\_A\; M\_B\; over\; |r\_\{AB\}|^2\}$
where ''G'' is the universal gravitational constant. The above statement may be reformulated in the following way: if ''g'' is the acceleration of a reference mass at a given location in a gravitational field, then the gravitational force on an object with gravitational mass ''M'' is
:$f\; =\; Mg.\; ,$
This is the basis by which masses are determined by weighing. In simple bathroom scales, for example, the force ''f'' is proportional to the displacement of the spring beneath the weighing pan (see Hooke's law), and the scales are calibrated to take ''g'' into account, allowing the mass ''M'' to be read off. Note that a balance (see the subheading within Weighing scale) as used in the laboratory or the health club measures gravitational mass; only the spring scale measures weight.

Equivalence of inertial and gravitational masses

The equivalence of inertial and gravitational masses is sometimes referred to as the ''Galilean equivalence principle'' or ''weak equivalence principle''. The most important consequence of this equivalence principle applies to freely falling objects. Suppose we have an object with inertial and gravitational masses ''m'' and ''M'' respectively. If the only force acting on the object comes from a gravitational field ''g'', combining Newton's second law and the gravitational law yields the acceleration
:
This says that the ratio of gravitational to inertial mass of any object is equal to some constant ''K'' if and only if ''all objects fall at the same rate in a given gravitational field''. This phenomenon is referred to as the ''universality of free-fall''. (In addition, the constant ''K'' can be taken to be 1 by defining our units appropriately.)
The first experiments demonstrating the universality of free-fall were conducted by Galileo. It is commonly stated that Galileo obtained his results by dropping objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but this is most likely apocryphal; actually, he performed his experiments with balls rolling down inclined planes. Increasingly precise experiments have been performed, such as those performed by Loránd Eötvös, using the torsion balance pendulum, in 1889. To date, no deviation from universality, and thus from Galilean equivalence, has ever been found, at least to the accuracy 1/10¹². More precise experimental efforts are still being carried out.
The universality of free-fall only applies to systems in which gravity is the only acting force. All other forces, especially friction and air resistance, must be absent or at least negligible. For example, if a hammer and a feather are dropped from the same height on Earth, the feather will take much longer to reach the ground; the feather is not really in ''free''-fall because the force of air resistance upwards against the feather is comparable to the downward force of gravity. On the other hand, if the experiment is performed in a vacuum, in which there is no air resistance, the hammer and the feather should hit the ground at exactly the same time (assuming the acceleration of both objects towards each other, and of the ground towards both objects, for its own part, is negligible). This demonstration is easily done in a high-school laboratory, using two transparent tubes connected to a vacuum pump.
A stronger version of the equivalence principle, known as the ''Einstein equivalence principle'' or the ''strong equivalence principle'', lies at the heart of the general theory of relativity. Einstein's equivalence principle states that it is impossible to distinguish between a uniform acceleration and a uniform gravitational field. Thus, the theory postulates that inertial and gravitational masses are fundamentally the same thing.

Relationship between mass and energy

In special relativity, mass and energy are intimately related, as described by the famous equation ''E = mc²''; see mass-energy equivalence and mass in special relativity.

References

1. Relativity: Special, General and Cosmological, , Wolfgang, Rindler, Oxford University Press, 2001, Section 1.12
2. Rindler, ''supra'', end of Section 1.14


★ R.V. Eötvös ''et al'', Ann. Phys. (Leipzig) '68' 11 (1922)

★ Spacetime Physics, , Edwin F., Taylor, W.H. Freeman and Company, 1992, ISBN 0-7167-2327-1

See also

★ Density

★ Higgs boson

★ Mass in special relativity

★ Mass in general relativity

★ Orders of magnitude (mass)

★ Planck units

★ Volume

External links

★ Usenet Physics FAQ

★
★ Does mass change with velocity?

★
★ Does light have mass?

★ The Origin of Mass and the Feebleness of Gravity (video) - a colloquium lecture by the Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek

★ Mass & energy

★ Photons, Clocks, Gravity and the Concept of Mass by L.B.Okun

★ The Apollo 15 Hammer-Feather Drop

★ Apollo 15 Hammer-Feather gravity demonstration video (higher quality)

★ Online mass units conversion

★ Scientific American Magazine (July 2005 Issue) The Mysteries of Mass