I have been quite taken up of late
wondering about relativistic mass.
Mass and mass in motion. From a systems
perspective it sure gets interesting.
On the one hand, you have to accept the
idea that, though any object, or quanta, has a perceived unity of
meaning, and therefore a consistent solidity of boundary properties,
it is still an abstracted unit of process. One for which contained
motion is prominent. The inner workings of other, lower scaled,
abstractions, each with their own set of boundary properties,
interacting with each other, present to us a new, self sustaining
abstraction.
In our scale of things then, when we
imagine, or actually initiate, various external forces to this
already encapsulated bit of meaning, we imply to it motion relative
to us that it did not heretofore have. In doing that we create a new
set of meaning considerations. Though the intrinsic initial mass does
not change, the overall meaning must because there is now the total
kinetic energy of the object. Mass and energy are two sides of the
same coin, of course, so, whatever the rest mass may have been, the
object now has a mass that includes the imparted velocity; something
that is, in one sense a potential, but in another a thing already
realized as any attempt to increase its velocity takes even more
energy; a process that steadily yields diminishing returns as this
potential/real mass increases. Wherein lies the inherent limit of the
speed of light.
It seems to me, then, that all mass is,
in a sense, relative. Already encapsulated bits don't change relative
to us because all of the bits of meaning around us, and of us,
started from the same point of reference. And we now exist in a
synchronized vector of meaning interaction. Which is nothing more
than to say a system where the boundary resolutions at particular
scales of consideration have been set so that fundamental process
abstractions remain constant relative to our vector of association.
One can then consider the system as a
three dimensional white board that must expand so as to allow for
more meanings to begin to collect as the excitement of birth cools
down and basic interactions create more abstractions to allow for
even more complex interactions to follow. Just as more words must
have more pages for which to allow them expression.
Through out all of this, I think, is a
certain synchronicity that remains at various scales so that meaning
can have consistency over space and duration. Complexity, however,
has a habit of throwing ever more uncertainty into total system
process. This would have to become especially vexing for a system
where motion, and the differential of observed, and observer, as
regards duration and the space therein, comes into play.
To my mind everything in this overall,
more complexly expanded, system is relativistic mass to one degree or
another; especially when one begins to consider the biggest of
singular concentrations of encapsulated motion. They seemingly begin
and they end without ever actually creating or destroying anything,
even as they deny any outgoing information. One then has to wonder
just how consistent synchronicity can remain.
We believe we see only so much
ordinarily encapsulated meaning in the cosmos but it is not nearly
enough to account for how overall expansion has proceeded with the
structures thus revealed so far. And now we also detect that
expansion is actually accelerating, though the mass/energy repression
that would account for this is also not directly observable.
Those previously mentioned
concentrations of meaning, representing a speed of process, or
conversely, so much accumulated meaning, that it cannot communicate
in any ordinary sense within our vector of association, still seem to
evaporate in some fashion. But to where, and how? Conversely objects
at a certain scale can become meaning entangled, and remain so,
regardless of distance. But does that necessarily hold true for time
as well?
What I am suggesting here is that
causality, and thus the transfer of meaning, is a great deal more
complex than we currently realize. And one of the important aspects
of this is the fact that observations, and the meanings derived from
them, need to be handled with a great deal more circumspection, as
well as skepticism, when they cross large spans of scale. As such,
taking a measurement at one scale and then using the results to
deduce conclusions at another, may be problematic at best, and
perhaps more invasive, or deterministic—either as a cause or an
effect, than we realize as well.
I can only hope that those who have
credibility in the sciences are already considering these aspects a
great deal more deeply than I am able to.
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