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Originally Posted by Yakk
Is a Photon Matter? Or, are you asserting a Photon cannot exist without Matter? That's getting pretty obtuse. Gravaton?
Because, Photon's aren't very "Matter"-like, and they contain Energy (and hence have Mass).
(ok ok, Non-Baryonic matter. Meh, not very Matter-esque!)
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I like to think of matter as anything that's defined as being a particle in the current Standard Model.
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How about Negative Energy Fields? I think it is believed they have negative mass. (you can apparenly build them by placing two metal plates very close together in a vacuum -- between the plates, you end up with something that is more empty than a vacuum.)
Are Negative Energy Fields matter? (I suppose you can renormalize the universe, so hard vacuum isn't at zero, and thus make 'Negative Energy Fields' just 'a place with less stuff than a hard vacuum')
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I'm an engineer, not a theorist, so this is currently beyond me. But here's a good article about the Casimir effect:
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/15/9/6
Notice that all fields being refered to are still EM fields, which , I believe, still have to be quantized as photons.
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Measuring energy as mass has some nice properties. It does away with two extra units: distance and time are no longer "dimensions" to your energy unit.
The photon has 2*10^-16 kg of Energy.
We provided 2*10^-20 kg of heat to the water.
The bomb blast was 2.5 * 10^-1 kg of Energy! (5 megatonnes, if I did my math right)
It is sort of like measuring distance as time, or time as distance. Once you have a nice conversion factor (c), keeping track of both units seems silly.
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I'm not sure about this. I don't think it would be very useful, since most physics work is done in energy. In fact, it's far more common to use energy units to measure mass, than to use mass units to measure energy.
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I think this is a philosophical position, or a convention, not a scientific statement.
If you interprited Energy as the thing (maybe the only thing!) that has Mass, and note that all Matter has Rest Energy, you should be able to do the exact same physics. Just with slightly different translations into English.
Hell, you could say that Energy is the only thing, and that it "must" have Matter (instead of Matter "must" have Energy).
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Except that in a historical context (and a teaching context), classical physics came first. Also, I'm not sure how the Higgs boson fits into all this. (I'm an engineer, not a theorist).
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Slavakion, from what I can tell, Fckm was mostly disagreeing with terminology.
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yup
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I don't believe Fckm disagrees with the statement "the gravitational and inertial mass of a closed system is constant". Which means melting an icecube results in water that weighs more than the ice cube did, by an increadibly small amount.
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I agree, although the amount is so small, it's not measureable.