Quote Originally Posted by OngBonga View Post
Not so sure. I might be wrong here, but I consider them to be related in the same way electricity and magnetism are. And while we might think they are different things, they're not, since it depends on your frame of reference. One person might observe an electric field while someone else observes a magnetic field.

I have a better idea of what mass is than energy though. Mass is a measure of inertia and is a property of things that move slower than light. That's your rest mass. But if you're moving relative to what you want to measure, it has some relativistic mass. That relativistic mass only exists though in the frame of reference of someone moving at a different velocity. If you're moving at 0.999c, then something else moving at 0.999c in the same direction has no relativistic mass and only rest mass, from your FoR. So relativistic mass is not a measure of inertia, it's a measure of velocity. I just turned relativistic mass into kinetic energy. And rest mass is essentially potential energy. Saying mass isn't energy seems the same as saying kinetic energy isn't potential energy, but again that depends entirely on your frame of reference.
You were simply exchanging mass and energy as though there's no conversion factor between them, is all.

You said, "I used the term "Planck mass" because I (probably naively) assumed that was one base unit of energy. But maybe it isn't."

I was just pointing out that there is a Planck energy, and it is the energy associated with a photon of a Planck length.

It is just assuming the Planck Length is the wavelength of the photon and we know that E = hf, and that wave speed is c, so we tie all that together and ignore the difference between h and h_bar and call it the Planck energy, even though we used h_bar in our calculation and it's clearly E = hf, and not E = h_bar f, but ... what's a factor of 2 pi among physicists?

I mean... I'm talking a bit of trash at the whole notion that the Planck Length is more than a trick of juggling numbers with the whole 2 pi talk, but ... I'm not wrong. That factor of 2 pi is just ignored, because the method of juggling numbers with various units to get out another number with another unit - called the Buckingham Pi method - completely ignores any constant factors in the conversion.


IDK if I'd put mass and energy on the same tit for tat relationship as electric and magnetic fields, though. Energy takes a lot of forms and all.