Top Ten Things That Would Be Hard To Imagine Without Mass
Mass is something which, unless you're a physicist, or an American, is taken for granted. What would life be like if it didn't exist? I've explained how the universe would be different below.Mass is a property that prevents you from traveling at the speed of light all the time and allows you to travel at speeds lower than light speed. Without mass, you would be completely unable to stop and could only reduce your momentum upon collision with an object by increasing the wavelength of the wave associated with your motion.
However, if nothing else had mass, you might as well be constantly stationary, as everything else would be moving at the same speed as you. Thus, you would be unable to move relative to anything and would see electromagnetic waves standing still next to you. The only way something would defy this principle is if two waves associated with your motion were out of phase or moving in the opposite direction. Imagine it.
Without mass, you simply do not experience time. Nothing would. In a world without time, everything you would experience would fly past you in literally zero time. That's even hard for me to picture.
If gluons, which drive the strong nuclear force, and W and Z bosons, which drive the weak nuclear force, were massless, these forces would, like gravity and electromagnetism, have an infinite range. Nuclear fusion, as well as radioactive decay, would be much easier, and one could theoretically achieve fusion with everyday energy transfers.
However, beta decay would not occur if W and Z bosons were stable and had infinite range. If this were so, many other interactions involving the transfer of these bosons could occur at any distances, creating seemingly random changes of leptons into other leptons, possibly from light-years away.
Gravity is not directly caused by mass but by energy, which dilates the spacetime continuum. However, the absence of mass would take a sufficient amount of this away. Gravity would still exist but on a much smaller scale.
Ignoring the absence of time, time dilation would be minuscule. It would be hard to stay on Earth, hard for Earth to form in the first place, and harder for stars to ignite and produce the heavy chemical elements we rely on to live. The universe would, overall, progress a lot more slowly.
On the plus side, as you float aimlessly through space, you are less likely to incinerate as you approach a star or be torn to shreds by a black hole, given that they are much less likely to come to be.
With all objects moving at light speed, exchange particles are hard to picture. Any particles emitted from or absorbed by another must move relative to that particle and can only take place at specific angles. Realistically, quantum interactions would only make sense in terms of phase difference in waves.
Due to redshift and blueshift, the particles within the interaction would receive energy in a mix of quantities unlike anything that involves mass. The wave-particle duality would have some loophole.
With nothing, not even light, moving relative to you, the conditions required for pair production would be unlikely to arise. We would be without the fundamental constituents of the atom, and most particles would disobey the exclusion principle.
Thus, structures from the huge to the tiny would be hard to create. Scary.
Suppose structures that we know of could exist without mass. The net quantum spin would still be zero, and so the entire structure would exist within a superfluid state. Any structures that could exist would do so without viscosity.
Any transfer of a vector to it would result in all particles following said vector, always at one speed. Mind-blowing.
Given that light, in a massless universe, cannot progress in the same way we know, depending on the dimensional components of its direction, the structures of an optical medium cannot materialize as we know it. The electromagnetic disturbance a photon imposes would fail to cause any internal pressure on the given structure.
The idea of a refractive index would, therefore, collapse. Light would either be transmitted or absorbed.
Assuming the effect of dark matter would still exist, the gravitational dilation would still be minuscule compared to that of our current universe. The imbalance between it and dark energy would be much greater, so the universe would fly apart as a result.
The uncertainty principle would apply to everything in a massless universe, simply because the physics of all objects would have to be described as a function of a wave. As no two wave peaks coexist on a fundamental vibration pattern, the zeroth overtone, there is always position uncertainty.
When we isolate these peaks, the momentum is unknown. That's the uncertainty principle in a nutshell. Only now, it would be everywhere.
What should I say? Brilliantly made list! I love it. But for everything, having no mass becomes really complicated if taken from a biological sense.
There would be a lack of senses, no blood flow, a collapsing body - or, I mean, an evaporating body. Even disintegration into minute particles could be possible. All reality would become haphazard, as if there were a world without mass.
That's true. The Higgs would not be of much significance without mass, except as a link in the standard model.