M IS FOR MASS:

For a long time the concept of “mass” had been like the concept of energy before Faraday n the other nineteenth century scientists did their work. There were a lot of different material substances around, but it was not clear how they related to each other, if they did at all. 

          Antonie-Laurent Lavoiser was the man who first showed that all the seemingly diverse bits of all the “mass” there is, really where a part of a single connected whole. Lavoiser was working in a “General Farm” that collected tax for Louis XVI’s government. He could concentrate on his science only for a single day a week. With the help of his wife he started truly major experiment. He was going watch a piece of metal slowly burn, or maybe just rust. He wanted to find out whether it would weigh more or less than it did before.

[Before going on why don’t you try answering this question. Let a piece of metal rust, compared to before rusting how much could it weigh:

A) less  B) The same  C) more]    

        Lavoiser set up a special apparatus to test this phenomenon in case of different substances in his house itself. They let different substances corrode and measured the difference in their weights and also carefully measured how much air may have been lost. Thus, the answer for the above question was available. It weighs more.

       This was unexpected. It was found that the oxygen that had been in the gases floating above was no longer in the air, it simply stuck on to the metal. With his fussily meticulous weighing machine, Lavoisier had shown that matter can move around from one form to another, yet it will not burst in and out of existence. This was one of the prime discoveries of 1700’s. Thus, the concept of conservation of mass had been established.

           Everyone where convinced that all forms of energy were related and all forms of mass were related, but nothing connected the two realms. Einstein did find that there was a link between the two domains, but he dint do it the way someone would expect. He never did any experiments of hours together of work to prove it. He seemed to abandon mass and energy, and began to focus on what appeared to be an unrelated topic. He began to look at speed of light.