- #1
yhPscis
- 17
- 0
I understand that mass isn't weight. When I look up "what is mass?", I come across all kinds of videos explaining the difference between mass and weight, but that is not what I am looking for. I'm trying to understand the concept of mass, fundamentally, because it doesn't really mean anything to me right now and makes it difficult for me to concretely grasp the many physical formulas and concepts that involve mass because of this.
Wiki defines it as "a property of a physical body which determines the body's resistance to being accelerated by a force and the strength of its mutual gravitational attraction with other bodies", but all this says is what mass does, not what mass is.
To me this is like: If I ask "what is an atom?" and people respond "it's something that forms covalent bonds", I still don't know what this "something" is. If it's defined as "the smallest unit an object consists of", then I can mentally represent what the concept is about (because cutting things into smaller pieces is something I come across in my daily life); it becomes something more concrete. I'd like "mass" to be as clear in my mind, but it isn't.
Can you please explain it to me?
Do we even know what mass fundamentally is or do we only know it's there because we empirically observe its effects, but do not know what it fundamentally is?
Mass is sometimes defined as "the amount of matter" that something has, but even "matter" I don't really understand as a fundamental concept. Intuitively, I saw it as "the tangible elements that objects are made of", and objects are made of atoms, so that led me to try to understand it as the amount of atoms objects have, but that makes no sense because things are made out of billions and billions of atoms, so something that has a mass of 3 kg wouldn't exist. What does this "3" refer to if it isn't the amount of atoms? How can you quantify something that isn't fundamentally defined?
Maybe I sound a little dense, and I'm sorry for that, but I'm just not wrapping my head around this one. Thank you if you're willing to spell things out for me. =/
Wiki defines it as "a property of a physical body which determines the body's resistance to being accelerated by a force and the strength of its mutual gravitational attraction with other bodies", but all this says is what mass does, not what mass is.
To me this is like: If I ask "what is an atom?" and people respond "it's something that forms covalent bonds", I still don't know what this "something" is. If it's defined as "the smallest unit an object consists of", then I can mentally represent what the concept is about (because cutting things into smaller pieces is something I come across in my daily life); it becomes something more concrete. I'd like "mass" to be as clear in my mind, but it isn't.
Can you please explain it to me?
Do we even know what mass fundamentally is or do we only know it's there because we empirically observe its effects, but do not know what it fundamentally is?
Mass is sometimes defined as "the amount of matter" that something has, but even "matter" I don't really understand as a fundamental concept. Intuitively, I saw it as "the tangible elements that objects are made of", and objects are made of atoms, so that led me to try to understand it as the amount of atoms objects have, but that makes no sense because things are made out of billions and billions of atoms, so something that has a mass of 3 kg wouldn't exist. What does this "3" refer to if it isn't the amount of atoms? How can you quantify something that isn't fundamentally defined?
Maybe I sound a little dense, and I'm sorry for that, but I'm just not wrapping my head around this one. Thank you if you're willing to spell things out for me. =/