🚀 go-pugleaf

sichase@csa2.lbl.gov (SCOTT I CHASE) writes:

>In article <mcirvin.711904014@husc8>, mcirvin@husc8.harvard.edu (Mcirvin) writes...
>> 
>>Actually, neither definition of mass would be temperature-independent,
>>if you define it for the whole lump of coal.  When you raise the
>>temperature, the energy in the rest frame increases!  The sum of
>>the masses of all the particles is perhaps temperature-independent,
>>but as you complained before, that's not the mass of the lump.

>But inertial mass *can* be termperature dependent.
[description of experiments with hydrogen]

That's what I said...  Oh, you mean of the individual constituents of
the object.  Yes, I imagine so; I was talking about the idealized
picture of atoms as billiard balls, not the situation in which they
have internal degrees of freedom.

This just illustrates further the fact that *no* reasonable definition
of mass, "rest" or "relativistic," is temperature-independent for an
object with internal structure.

-- 
Matt McIrvin   mcirvin@husc.harvard.edu   Long live short .sigs