alt.sci.physics

nottoooily@ wrote:
> On Aug 12, 1:09 pm, "amygdala" wrote:
>
>> The faster Mass travels, the more it disintegrates (for a lack of a
>> better term) into Energy. Therefor, if Mass travels fast enough
>> (speed of light?) it will no longer be Mass, but it will have become
>> Energy. Is that a correct assumption?
>
> That isn't the way it's usually thought of. E=mc^2 represents the
> energy contained in a piece of matter at rest. As a massive object
> approaches the speed of light, its total energy aproaches infinity
> (according to E = m c^2 / sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) ), while its mass remains
> constant.
>
> It's possible to define mass so that it increases with speed
> (relativistic mass), but that's not the convention in physics, and it
> doesn't make any difference to what's actually happening.
>
> The reason a speed-of-light particle must have no mass is that if it
> had any mass, it would also have infinity energy.

So basically, what you are saying is, that: a moving particle will have mass
just up until it reaches the speed of light, but on reaching c it all of a
sudden doesn't have mass anymore, or theoretically can't be mass anymore?
That sounds a bit odd doesn't it? Well, at least to me it does.

What would be the 'state', if you will, of mass when it is gaining speed? My
gutfeeling tells me this state should somehow change while gaining momentum.

I looked at it more like this: I sort of think of atoms, molecules,
particles, etc. as very compact strings, or fields, or boals of energy,
which therefor feel like having mass, but actually aren't mass at all, just
very powerfull, almost unpenetratable, fields of energy, that expand into
less dense fields of energy while gaining momentum. Or something along those
lines. :-)

Does that make any sense?