On Defining Mass

Abstract

Though central to any pedagogical development of physics, the concept of mass is still not well understood. Properly defining mass has proven to be far more daunting than contemporary textbooks would have us believe. And yet today the origin of mass is one of the most aggressively pursued areas of research in all of physics. Much of the excitement surrounding the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is associated with discovering the mechanism responsible for the masses of the elementary particles. This paper will first briefly examine the leading definitions, pointing out their shortcomings. Then, utilizing relativity theory, it will propose—for consideration by the community of physicists—a conceptual definition of mass predicated on the more fundamental concept of energy, more fundamental in that everything that has mass has energy, yet not everything that has energy has mass.