Is mass a real physical quantity?
Gordon Liu · viXra · 2018
Although mass is a very common and fundamental concept, but the problem of mass is still one of the key problems of modern Physics, up to the present the experts are not able to reach a consensus. In this paper, we have discussed the problems relating to mass, energy and matter, and been aware that mass is neither the amount of matter an object has, nor the measure of inertia and the source of gravitational field, whereas energy is the measure of the inertia of an object and also is the source of gravitational field. As before, Mass being used to measure the inertia and to calculate gravitational force is just an approximate method only for very slowly moving bodies and particles for which the rest energy is much larger than the kinetic energy. Actually the concept of mass is a superfluous artificial concept, just rest energy divided by a constant (If selecting c=1, the mass is exactly equal to the rest energy), does not have any other meaning. If the concept of mass is completely superseded by energy(or more precisely, rest energy), the physical equations are completely perfect, their meanings are clearer, and the puzzles such as the relationship of mass and energy, nature of matter, the essence of the weak equivalence principle, the physical meaning of Higgs mechanism, etc., can be made clearer.