Physics Has Demoted Mass

You’re sitting here, reading this article. Maybe it’s a hard copy, or an e-book on a tablet computer or e-reader. It doesn’t matter. Whatever you’re reading it on, we can be reasonably sure it’s made of some kind of stuff: paper, card, plastic, perhaps containing tiny metal electronic things on printed circuit boards. Whatever it is, we call it matter or material substance. It has a characteristic property that we call solidity. It has mass.

But what is matter, exactly? Imagine a cube of ice, measuring a little over one inch (or 2.7 centimeters) in length. Imagine holding this cube of ice in the palm of your hand. It is cold, and a little slippery. It weighs hardly anything at all, yet we know it weighs something.

Let’s make our question a little more focused. What is this cube of ice made of? And, an important secondary question: What is responsible for its mass?

To understand what a cube of ice is made of, we need to draw on the learning acquired by the chemists. Building on a long tradition established by the alchemists, these scientists distinguished between different chemical elements, such as hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen. Research on the relative weights of these elements and the combining volumes of gases led John Dalton and Louis Gay-Lussac to the conclusion that different chemical elements consist of atoms with different weights which combine according to a set of rules involving whole numbers of atoms.

The mystery of the combining volumes of hydrogen and oxygen gas to produce water was resolved when it was realized that hydrogen and oxygen are both diatomic gases, H and O. Water is then aO.