History of mass

According to the Bible it was God who created the mass as said in Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning God manufactured the sky and the mass”. However, according to science the creation process of mass was more complicated. Before 15 milliards years there was nothing and every thing was concentrated in a single point-the singular point. The big bang caused an expansion of this point from which every thing was created, where the world is still expanding and its temperature is decreasing, which is partially proven by modern telescopes.

Fig.1.Creation of the universe and mass by God

During the expansion of the universe galaxies with different masses have been formed as well as stars and planets. In recent years it turned out also that the expansion of the universe is even accelerated. The Big bang model is a result of Einstein’s (1879-1955) General Theory of Relativity of 1915 on the basis of which physicists like Roger Penrose and Stephan Hawking indicated that the universe must have started by a singularity. In other word, according to science it is possible to determine that the universe must have a beginning, but it cannot explain why the universe was as it was. To get a better answer, Hawking referred this question to God. An alternative model for the origin of the universe and mass was the Steady State Theory developed in 1948 by Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold, Hermann Bondi and others. In the steady-state view, new matter is continuously created as the universe expands. The key importance of the steady-state model is that as a competitor to the Big Bang, it was a push in generating some of the most important research in astrophysics, much of which ultimately ended up supporting the Big Bang theory.

Fig.1 demonstrates simultaneously by an artwork the above models, namely, the creation of the universe and mass by God and the Big Bang. The author of this article installed the artwork in the center into the space that contains stars and planets. Alfred J. Smuskiewicz (1932) who was born in Chicago, Illinois and who has been exploring in his artwork the synthesis of science, religion, nature and history, painted the artwork in the center.

Mass via art

Mass is defined as the amount of matter in a given body. It is a fundamental concept in physics, roughly corresponding to the intuitive idea of "how much matter there is in an object". Mass is a scalar quantity, meaning it has no direction, and is a property of the object itself, not its location. Given a certain object, its mass will be the same on earth, on the moon, or in empty space. In our everyday experience, the heavier an object is the more mass it has. While the mass is normally considered to be an unchanging property of an object, at speeds approaching the speed of light one must consider the increase in the mass according to Einstein’s Special Relativity. This increase in mass, however, does not become appreciable until very great speeds are reached. The special theory of relativity also leads to the Einstein mass-energy relation, E=mc², where E is the energy, and m and c are the mass and the speed of light, respectively.

Fig.2. Demonstration of mass

Fig.2 demonstrates mass. On the left is a photograph of a “Lifter” by the American surreal photographer Rodney Smith (b.1947). In the middle is a sculpture located in the Frogner park in Oslo, Norway where on the right is a sculpture in one of the galleries in Paris photographed by the author. Fig.3 demonstrates small and big masses. Fig.3a, center, is the well known statue of David by Michelangelo (1475-1564) that can be found at the Accademia Galleria (Galleria dell'Accademia) in the San Marco District of Florence, Italy. This impressive 4.34 meter statue of the man who killed Goliath was sculpted during 1501 to 1504 when Michelangelo was only 29 years old. It has become a symbol both of strength and youthful of human beauty. The two photos of “Fat David” were offered by the Advertising Agency: Scholz & Friend, Hamburg, Germany (http://eternallycool.net/?p=777).

Fig.3. Small and big masses

The agency offer Fat David, an image from an advertising campaign created for the German Olympic Sport Committee. David has become beefy from too many years of standing in one place. So the message is “if you don’t move, you get fat”. And finally if Michelangelo lived today, and his sculpture was based on a modern day American, it might look a little bit like this... In Fig.3b, the small mass is demonstrated by the sculpture of Carlos Madeira, Portugal, located in Sintra, Portugal, where the large mass in Lisbon, Portugal, is the sculpture of Fernando Botero born in 1932 in Columbia. Fig.3c, “The battle of the Argonne” (1960) is an interesting demonstration of small mass – the cloud - and large mass – the rock. The Belgian surrealist artist Rene Magritte (1898-1967) painted it. Fig.3 is a fascinating caricature demonstrating simultaneously in each case mall and big masses. Fig.4 demonstrates an important property of mass, namely, mass always remains the same while weight changes depending on the surroundings. On the right hand side is the artwork of Magritte entitled “The castle of the Pyrenees” painted in 1959. The interaction with the ground creates weight W to the mass given by W = mg where m is the mass and g is the acceleration of gravity. On the left hand side is the rock in the absence of the ground, creating the impression that the rock is floating in the air, namely, mass still exists whereas weight disappeared.

Fig.4. Effect of gravity on mass

Mass conservation via art

An early yet incomplete theory of the law of conservation of mass was first stated in the 13th century by Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201-1274), an Islamic astronomer and mathematician. He wrote that a body of matter is able to change, but is not able to disappear. The law was first clearly formulated in 1789 by Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794), a French nobleman, who is often referred to as a father of modern chemistry. His statement reads: ”In a chemical reaction, matter is neither created nor destroyed”.

An alternative statement reads: “In any chemical reaction the mass of the product is always equal to the mass of the reactants”. However, Mikhail Kimonosov (1711-1765) had previously expressed similar ideas in 1748 and proved them in experiments. Eventually, the law of conservation of mass or of matter is known as the Lomonosov-Lavoisier law and it states that: “The mass of substances in a closed system will remain constant, no matter what processes are acting inside the system”. It is a different way of stating that though matter may change form, it can be neither created nor destroyed. The mass of the reactants must always equal the mass of the products. This law works fine for anything that is not approaching the speed of light; at high speeds, mass begins transforming to energy.

In the following we demonstrate the law by applying statements of the law that are equivalent to each other: “In any change of state the total mass is conserved” or “The total mass m of a system is equal to the sum of the mass m_i of its components". Figs.5 and 6 demonstrate the first statement where Fig.5 is a sculpture located in Frogner park, Oslo, Norway.

Fig.5. m = m1 + m2 + m3 + m4 + m5

Fig.6. m = m1 + m2 + m3 + m4

Figs.7-9 demonstrate the following statement of the law of conservation mass: “In any change of state the total mass is conserved”.  Fig.7 shows a split of an egg in a surrealistic way where the yolk is demonstrated by the sun and the egg white into water.

Fig.7. m = m1 + m2 + m3 + m4

Fig.8 is another demonstration of the law based on the split of the human body where the bodies seem different in size due to the perspective effect.  Fig.9 is another demonstration based on the original artwork on the left painted by Fernando Botero (b.1932), a neo-figurative Colombian artist.  The author of the article divided each image on the left and combined it in a different way as demonstrated on the right-hand-side and thus the law is applied artistically.

And finally we demonstrate mass with respect to Einstein’s special relativity, which agrees well with Newtonian mechanics when velocities are small, compared to the speed of light.  However, special relativity overthrows Newtonian notions of absolute space and time by stating that time and space are perceived differently by observers in different states of motion.  This yields the equivalence of mass and energy, as expressed in the mass-energy equivalence

 formula E = mc², where c is the speed of light in a vacuum.  Thus, energy may

be looked upon as dispersed mass and mass may be considered as concentrated energy.  Fig.10 left by Rene Magritte entitled “The pleasure principle” (1937) demonstrates the above phenomenon as follows.  According to Einstein, mass is concentrated energy, simulated by the person's body in the painting, where energy is dispersed mass, like his face.  It is also interesting to mention that people will also tell you that the image in Magritte’s painting reminds them so much Einstein's image shown on the right.  Tullio Pricoli (b.1936), an Italian illustrator, painted this portrait.

Fig.8. m = m1 + m2 + m3 + m4

Fig.9. m1 + m2 = 0.5 m1 + 0.5m2 + 0.5 m2 + 0.5m1

Fig.10. E = mc2

In conclusion it is expected that the above demonstrations by art of the concept of mass make it more understandable, perceptible and easy to remember.