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Inertial Mass Separate From Gravitational Mass?

Posted by Soulskill on from the what-an-interesting-mass-effect dept.

CPerdue writes with this excerpt from the MIT arXiv blog: "The equivalence principle is one of the more fascinating ideas in modern science. It asserts that gravitational mass and inertial mass are identical. Einstein put it like this: the gravitational force we experience on Earth is identical to the force we would experience were we sitting in a spaceship accelerating at 1g. Newton might have said that the m in F=ma is the same as the ms in F=Gm1m2/r^2. ... All that changes today with the extraordinary work of Endre Kajari at the University of Ulm in Germany and a few buddies. They show how it is possible to create situations in the quantum world in which the effects of inertial and gravitational mass must be different. In fact, they show that these differences can be arbitrarily large."

2 of 405 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Inertial Dampeners??? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    From Princeton's WordNet on the definition of "dampen":
    # S: (v) dampen, damp, soften, weaken, break (lessen in force or effect) "soften a shock"; "break a fall"

    A damper is either a movable iron plate to control the draft in a furnace, a device that decreases the amplitude of oscillations, or a depressing (as in emotional) restraint. Inertia is not a furnace, an oscillation, nor an emotion.

    This post was brought to you by the Arrogant Pedants' Society.

  2. Re:Sure, here you go by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    "Professor" Aquino is widely known as a total nut. For Newton's sake, his theory "includes not only force particles and matter particles, not only general relativity and Quantum Gravity, but also a theory of consciousness"!! He can't publish his papers at the "Journal of New Energy"! Heck, one of his abstracts starts with "The existence of imaginary mass associated to the neutrino is already well-known" (and as a particle physicist, I've never seen any theory or experiment that even suggests an imaginary mass). He was worked at INPE (which is a very respected research institution) in a data-taking-monkey position; then got a job at the Maranhão state university (where there is NO research at all). He is listed at UEMA as having only a masters' degree (no PhD, so he can't have a research position). Please, don't mention him on an article about science. It's just like mentioning a 1940 VW Beetle when discussing today's F1 cars.