Physics Help Forum Kinetic energy relation to mass of an object.

 Special and General Relativity Special and General Relativity Physics Help Forum

Jul 16th 2017, 04:22 PM   #21
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 Originally Posted by kiwiheretic Well, one experiment might be to fire an object to a known velocity at a spring oriented horizontally and then finding the maximum compression of the spring and using Hooke's law, calculate the inertial mass, then conduct the same experiment place the object on a spring scale and then again measure the gravitational mass and then check if these two quantities are equal.
That won't work because you must first define those quantities. For example: how does one determine the gravitational constant?

As I mentioned, you can choose constants of motion so that they will be equal numerically. Its only through observation that the equality can be determined. Its important to realize that these terms were never defined merely to give different names to the same quantities. That'd be absurd.

 Originally Posted by kiwiheretic Not sure if its possible to measure relativistic mass in this way
There are other ways of doing it. You can accelerate a body at a constant rate using a spring scale where the body is moving along the face of the scale. That would tell you the inertial mass of the body. What's important to know here is that in reality you'd be measuring the transverse mass. But that's numerically equal to the relativistic mass. I think Einstein mentions this in his 1905 SR paper in fact.

Then you place the scale at rest on the surface of the Earth then slide the body along the scale.

See Weight of a Moving Body

However to be precise one must use inertial mass as how its properly define, i.e. using Newton's definition. Weyl also, in effect, defined mass in that way.

 Jul 16th 2017, 04:54 PM #22 Physics Team   Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Boston's North Shore Posts: 1,576 As I mentioned above one can choose units so that m_i = m. Does this mean that the two quantities have the same physical meaning? Let's consider an analogy from relativity. One can choose units so that the value of the speed of light is unity, i.e. c = 1. In that case E = mc^2 then becomes E = m Does anybody think that this expression means that mass an energy have the same physical meaning? Last edited by Pmb; Jul 17th 2017 at 12:26 AM.
Aug 3rd 2017, 05:03 AM   #23
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 Originally Posted by kiwiheretic (...) Not sure if its possible to measure relativistic mass in this way
Do you know Bertozzi's experiment about electrons at very high speed?

see: Lorentz factor, part one.

 Aug 3rd 2017, 05:05 AM #24 Junior Member   Join Date: Aug 2017 Posts: 2 Lorentz factor at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Pktu7WmM1Y
 Aug 3rd 2017, 10:10 PM #25 Physics Team   Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Boston's North Shore Posts: 1,576 Sean Carroll has a poor understanding of the history of physics in certain areas, such as this. He asserted that it was because of Einstein that there are other kinds of mass, which is not true. Carroll asserts that the velocity dependence was due to Einstein, which is false. It was due to Max Abraham and others before the publication of Einstein's paper on it. The concept had indeed be widely discussed before Einstein. And the concept of relativisticmass was due to Tolman and Gilbert See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_i...ial_relativity In his GR text he also claims that the speed of light does not change in a gravitational field despite the fact that its been demonstrated by Irwin Shapiro. Carroll also makes the mistake of what he claims what Einstein meant by E = mc^2 since Einstein demonstrated that it also works of radiation, which has no rest mass. I gave up after watching that so I wouldn't get so frustrated with him. This is just another example of a very smart man saying a dumb thing. Last edited by Pmb; Aug 3rd 2017 at 10:16 PM.

 Tags energy, kinetic, mass, object, relation