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Mass-related order parameters

Antonio DiCarlo (Universita Roma Tre)

SES Medal Symposium in honor of D.J. Steigmann

Tue 10:45 - 12:15

MacMillan 115

As I see it, mass is the Cinderella of continuum mechanics. Its balance, beside getting the silly misnomer of ‘continuity equation,’ appears typically as an idle identity. Assuming a different point of view, I regard mass density as an (admittedly crude) order parameter. Granted that mass is carried by molecules and that their mass is conserved (and, for simplicity, equal for all of them), density provides macroscopically relevant information on the number of molecules contained in a representative chunk of space, a number that you cannot count without a suitable microscope. Elaborating on this idea, I motivate and introduce refined bona fide order parameters hypothetically describing macroscopic manifestations of finer properties of molecular mass distribution, as statistically summarized by the radial distribution function.