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In physics, a mass balance, also called a material balance, is an application of conservation of mass [1] to the analysis of physical systems. By accounting for material entering and leaving a system, mass flows can be identified which might have been unknown, or difficult to measure without this technique.
In theoretical physics, negative mass is a hypothetical type of exotic matter whose mass is of opposite sign to the mass of normal matter, e.g. −1 kg. [1] [2] Such matter would violate one or more energy conditions and exhibit strange properties such as the oppositely oriented acceleration for an applied force orientation.
For example, in chemical reactions, the mass of the chemical components before the reaction is equal to the mass of the components after the reaction. Thus, during any chemical reaction and low-energy thermodynamic processes in an isolated system, the total mass of the reactants, or starting materials, must be equal to the mass of the products.
Negative mass would possess some strange properties, such as accelerating in the direction opposite of applied force. Despite being inconsistent with the expected behavior of "normal" matter, negative mass is mathematically consistent and introduces no violation of conservation of momentum or energy .
Sometimes in the field of physics "matter" is simply equated with particles that exhibit rest mass (i.e., that cannot travel at the speed of light), such as quarks and leptons. However, in both physics and chemistry, matter exhibits both wave-like and particle-like properties, the so-called wave–particle duality. [10] [11] [12]
Given the equivalence of mass and energy expressed by Albert Einstein's E = mc 2, any point in space that contains energy can be thought of as having mass to create particles. Modern physics has developed quantum field theory (QFT) to understand the fundamental interactions between matter and forces; it treats every single point of space as a ...
Bondi pointed out that a negative mass will fall toward (and not away from) "normal" matter, since although the gravitational force is repulsive, the negative mass (according to Newton's law, F=ma) responds by accelerating in the opposite of the direction of the force. Normal mass, on the other hand, will fall away from the negative matter.
Mathematically, mass flux is defined as the limit =, where = = is the mass current (flow of mass m per unit time t) and A is the area through which the mass flows.. For mass flux as a vector j m, the surface integral of it over a surface S, followed by an integral over the time duration t 1 to t 2, gives the total amount of mass flowing through the surface in that time (t 2 − t 1): = ^.