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inflector
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What Does "Anisotropic Effective Mass" Mean?
I'm reading "The Defintion of Mach's Principle" by Julian Barbour:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.3368
from July of this year, and it contains a paragraph (Section 9 bottom of page 23) I do not understand, the beginning of which says:
I have bolded the part that I don't understand. I tried googling the phrase but couldn't find a good definition.
What does "anisotropic effective mass" mean? I understand the individual words but they clearly have a meaning when combined that has specific meaning in physics.
Thanks in advance.
I'm reading "The Defintion of Mach's Principle" by Julian Barbour:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.3368
from July of this year, and it contains a paragraph (Section 9 bottom of page 23) I do not understand, the beginning of which says:
Even with the strong Poincaré sharpening of causality and the relativity principle that suggested the formulation of the previous section, there are many different possible theories that implement the above Mach’s principles for particle models. However, nearly all of them predict an anisotropic effective mass. That this could lead to a conflict with observation was already foreseen by the first creators of such theories: Hofmann, Reissner and Schr ̈odinger (their papers are translated in [6]). Since then, the extraordinarily accurate Hughes–Drever null experiments [33, 34] have completely ruled out such theories.
I have bolded the part that I don't understand. I tried googling the phrase but couldn't find a good definition.
What does "anisotropic effective mass" mean? I understand the individual words but they clearly have a meaning when combined that has specific meaning in physics.
Thanks in advance.