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Tag: mass

In physics, mass (from Greek μᾶζα “barley cake, lump (of dough)”), more specifically inertial mass, is a quantitative measure of an object’s resistance to acceleration. In addition to this, gravitational mass is a measure of magnitude of the gravitational force which is when interacting with a second object. The SI unit of mass is the kilogram (kg). In everyday usage, mass is referred to as “weight”, the units of which may be pounds or kilograms (for instance, a person’s weight may be stated as 75 kg). In scientific use, however, the term “weight” refers to a different, yet related, property of matter. Weight is the gravitational force acting on a given body—which differs depending on the gravitational pull of the opposing body (e.g. a person’s weight on Earth vs on the Moon) — while mass is an intrinsic property of that body that never changes. In other words, an object’s weight depends on its environment, while its mass does not. On the surface of the Earth, an object with a mass of…