Wednesday, March 27, 2019

energy - What is the symmetry which is responsible for conservation of mass?


According to Noether's theorem, all conservation laws originate from invariance of a system to shifts in a certain space. For example conservation of energy stems from invariance to time translation.


What kind of symmetry creates the conservation of mass?



Answer



Mass is only conserved in the low-energy limit of relativistic systems. In relativistic systems, mass can be converted into energy, and you can have processes like massive electron-positron pairs annhillating to form massless photons.


What is conserved (in theories obeying special relativity, at least) is mass energy--this conservation is enforced by the time and space translation invariance of the theory. Since the amount of energy in the mass dominates the amount of energy in kinetic energy (mc2 means a lot of energy is stored even in a small mass) for nonrelativistic motion, you get a very good approximation of mass conservation. out of the energy conservation.



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