with material substance, then, as a persisting something which exists independently of relations,one of the relations of which is mass.It is a common truism that the the total rest mass of an object can be divided by dividing thematerial in the object. Half of the loaf is about half the mass of the whole loaf. We can take thedivision to the size of atoms, at which point we must either stop or break the atom up intosmaller parts. The atom has mass, and the parts of the atom, electrons, neutrons and protons, aswell as the "pieces" they are broken into. It seems that the atomic level is not the primary level of organization, for below that are the elusive quarks.Where does divisibility end? Does the final product of division, itself, have mass, or is mass arelation created between parts at an even finer level? Fortunately, for the purposes of our discussion, we do not need to know. What we shall do is to employ a working hypothesis, whichcan be described in these terms:There is a unit of materiality that we shall call the fundamental mass unit which is the smallest(observable) amount of gravitational and inertial mass. Note that the fmu need not be an actual particle--that's not important here--its merely the smallest, concrete, unit of mass to which wehave need to make reference.Our purpose for positing the fmu is this. Physics, in considering mass as a fundamentalquantity, is defining mass in terms of relative
amounts
of mass. Relative amounts of mass can bemeasured and compared.What we want to do is to explore relations the relations of mass as athing of itself, and the relations of that to other masses.We can say that the proper mass of an object is the sum of the fmu's it contains: m=n(fmu).For example, when Newton's apple fell, we can more properly say that gravity acted not on themass as a quantity, but upon each fmu individually. It is the individual fmu that is accelerated, andhence the accelerated speed of falling is not determined by the quantity of fmu's it contains, buton the acceleration of each individual fmu.Or, let us consider the famous Law of Gravitation, F=Gm1m2/d^2. Why multiply one mass bythe other?( one might ask). While m1m2 is a product, it is also a sum. The first mass, m1,contains n1 fundamental mass units, and the second, n2, fmu. Each fmu of n1 has n2 relationswith the second mass. The sum of all the relations of the fmu's of m1 with m2 is simply m1m2.Suppose a solid object in our vicinity suddenly disappeared, or shall we say, dematerialized.What happens to the mass? We can imagine that the mass becomes imaginary, which is another way of saying not detectable. The framework of our thinking is structured on detectability. If itcannot be measured, it does not exist, is a rule of thumb for physical reality.It is necessary, for our purposes, to borrow a term from the physics of energy and posit kineticmass and potential mass. The energy of an object raised to a higher elevation, for example, isconsidered to be potential.Following this line of thought, we will conceive of the mass of a disappearing object becoming potential. The need for doing this will soon be clear when we consider the possibilityof a physical object being phase-shifted. If it is moved slightly ahead, or backward in the timecycle, it would, no doubt, disappear from our environment. We can then consider that its' masshas become potential, rather than ceasing to exist. A Cause of Mass?As a result of the "zoom" expansion we have suggested, any two physical objects in the present instant are further apart than they were in the previous instant. A slight lag in expansionwould be equivalent to their being slightly accelerated backward in time toward a closer conjunction.Hence, it might seem to the observer that they attracted one another gravitationally.But how do we account for a backward motion? It is the mass, after all, that is the evidence of the expansion. We think that we must posit a varying rate of expansion. The expansion is notlinear, but speeds up and slows down as we expect cyclical time to do. If the rate of expansion
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