Imagine being able to manipulate mass like we manipulate magnetism or electricity.
Imagine if we could turn a dial and make something that weighs a hundred thousand tons weigh 50 pounds, and float it in the sky with a helium ballon. Imagine an aircraft carrier dangling from a weather balloon.
Ok, I’ll say it.
I’M STUNED! THIS IS HUGH and SERIES!!!
To expound on this a little bit....
One of the great questions involves two aspects of mass.
First, there’s inertial mass: The tendency of an object’s motion to remain unvarying (including remaining at rest) except as acted on by external forces. This is elaborated in Newton’s first two Laws of Motion.
Second, there’s gravitational mass: The attraction between any two objects proportional to the product of their masses. This is elaborated in Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation.
So the question is, why are these two properties apparently inseparable? Why is a body’s inertial mass, for instance, exactly proportional to its weight (its attraction to a nearby large object such as the Earth)?
Think of all the implications if physicists could discover, or create, a discrepancy between the two! Your aircraft carrier suspended from a helium balloon is an example.