Physics has demoted mass 1

I will be writing a series of short comments about this article by Jim Baggott, Physics has demoted mass: modern physics has taught us that mass is not an intrinsic property.

***

What is the main thesis of this article?

It’s this:

Physicists figured that mass is not an intrinsic property of matter. But more importantly, matter does not exist.

But this article has an important problem. The author does hot define the words “matter” and “mass”. So we don’t know what he means when he uses these words.

When the author uses the word “matter” he may mean the absolute indivisible unit assumed to make up all solids. But he may also use the word “matter” colloquially to mean objects that appear as solids to us.

And indeed he uses “matter” in both senses in the article without making explicit which meaning he means. This is important because his arguments are based on exploiting this confusion.

When he uses “matter” as the absolute indivisible unit, or the indivisible “building blocks” of matter, he assumes the doctrine of atomic materialism, the fundamental and sacred doctrine of physics. This has been so since the founding father of physics, The Newton, defined nature to be made of indivisible particles.

Newton’s disciples the physicists continue to believe blindly this doctrine defined by Newton. The atomic materialism is so ingrained in physics that there are physicists who call themselves “particle” physicists. How can a physicist who calls himself a “particle” physicist question the sacred doctrine of atomic materialism?

But particle physics is not fundamental, the true fundamental research is the one that tries to answer the question “Is nature atomic?”

Is the world made of indivisible particles which make up everything around us? No physicist can ask this question.

If we do not assume atomic materialism, that is, if we do not assume a discontinuous nature, we could easily question everything physicists attributed to the concept of mass to save Newton’s authority.

Just by denying Newtonian atomic materialism and by reasoning outside of official physics tropes we easily arrived at idea that mass is a superfluous concept and it is not an intrinsic property of matter because we did not assume matter to begin with.

The author arrives at the same conclusion but he must present several old and discarded models of matter and mass first and then switch to the chemical notion of matter and mass and then switch finally to the fairy tales of the Standard Model to deny the existence of matter and mass. All this happens because he failed to define clearly what he meant by matter and mass. So he fooled us but more importantly he fooled himself.

The lack of proper definitions is a problem here too. The author and the physicists cannot decide if quarks are indivisible spherical “building blocks” of matter or just a label for “quantum field” since quarks are nothing more than oscillations of the quantum field. And quantum fields are not spherical particles.