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From galaxies to elementary particles
In 1970, the Atomizdat publishing house published an interesting book by F. S. Zavelsky, “Weighing Worlds, Atoms and Elementary Particles” *). The author himself defined the main idea of his book as follows:
“When describing the structure of a structure, I generally outline several of its projections (top view, side view, …). If the structure is complex, then, in addition, one or more of its sections are drawn and, moreover, so that the sections pass through the most complex nodes.
This book gives a “cross-section” of the World by mass. Mass is one of the main characteristics of a thing, so it is natural that a story about it, to one degree or another, touches on the purpose of a number of important scientific and technical problems.”
Indeed, all bodies, starting from the smallest elementary particles and ending with the Universe, have mass - this universal characteristic of materials. The author begins his story with a description of the design of the most ancient scales and units of measurement and ends with the gaps that modern physicists are thinking about.
Relatively recently, physicists have learned to measure the magnitude of the mass of various ancient scales and units of measurement and ends with gaps, which physicists of our days are thinking about.
Relatively recently, physicists have learned to measure the magnitude of the mass of various ancient scales and units of measurement and ends with gaps, which physicists of our days are thinking about.
*) F. S. Zavelsky, Weighing of worlds, atoms and elementary particles, Atomizdat, 1970, 31,000 copies, price 31 kopecks.
use, and described in the book by F. S. Zavelsky. But this is only one side of the problem of mass measurement considered by the author.
The second side of the problem, also considered by the author, is that the very concept of body mass became clearer and deeper as physics developed. F. S. Zavelsky in his book shows how scientific ideas about mass arose and were formed, how they changed over time.
In Newtonian mechanics, the mass of a body is a constant quantity and does not depend on the nature of the movement of this body. In the special theory of relative mass, the mass of a body changes with a change in the speed of its movement. In addition, even a body at rest has a huge supply of energy, which is uniquely determined by the mass of the body according to the value of the formula . It also turned out that the formation of a system of interacting bodies is inevitably associated with the loss of a certain proportion of the body mass included in the system. But even today, after all these discoveries, physicists do not consider that they already know what mass is.
The author’s original approach to the problem of mass forced him to bring into his book weight general material from the fields of physics and astronomy. This wealth of material made the book very interesting, but inevitably led to the fact that in some places the presentation of the issues under consideration turned out to be too complex.
Cursory, superficial. Often the author quickly talks about the idea of a measurement, without allowing the reader to delve deeper into the essence of this method. This is reflected even in those places where we are talking about certain basic concepts, for example, in the next first part when determining weight and mass. But what can you do - after all, in books there is a “law of conservation of volume”, as a result of which the breadth of presentation is to some extent inevitably associated with a decrease in its depth.
The book by F. S. Zavelsky is, of course, an interesting attempt to survey the general range of problems associated with the measurement of mass. After reading this book, you will learn many interesting facts, getting a clearer idea of how complex and diverse the problem of measuring the mass of various bodies is. Well, for those who want to study in depth any questions that interested him in the book, the author provides a list of additional literature at the end.
V. A. Leshkovce