ScienceToons #3: Matter

Everything matters.

The tree matters.

The air matters.

The bench matters.

The leaf matters.

You matter.

You matter because you are made out of matter.

Everything around us is!

What counts as matter? Something is matter if it takes up space and has mass.

I have this object here. Does it have matter?

First, let’s see if it takes up space. I have this box filled with stuff. I can close this box because there is enough space for the stuff in it to fit in the box. But when I put this object in the box, it no longer closes. That means that this object is taking up space.

That’s pretty simple.

But in science, we always want PROOF, and to get proof, we measure things. So then the question is, how much matter does this object have?

The amount of matter an object has is called mass.

There’s a couple of different ways to figure out how much mass an object has, the easiest way is to compare it with other stuff that also has mass.

So here I’m putting this object next to another object. Which one has more mass? Maybe you could say the bigger one, obviously. But where’s your proof? To prove it, we need to measure it.

Luckily, there’s an easy way to do it, with gravity.

Earth is so massive that it has a gravitational field, so any object smaller than it automatically falls towards it. The more mass something has, the more it falls towards Earth. This happens always and forever, without stopping. Even when something is on the floor, the Earth’s gravity is still pulling it to the ground. So a simple way to measure how much mass an object has can simply be putting something inbetween the object and the Earth, and seeing how much the object tries to get to the Earth, aka the ground.

Here I have a scale. It measures weight, which is the force inbetween an object and Earth. I’m going to put the object on top of the scale, and since it’s trying to get back to Earth, it is pushing the scale down, giving me a number.

And there it is! That’s how much weight this object has, which shows us that it does have mass.

So we have proof it has mass, so then how do you prove if the object takes up space? How do you measure that?

First, you need some space.

No, not that kind of space.

A space that ends.

Here’s this box again.

We know it couldn’t fit everything it has plus my object, which means it only has a finite amount of space, aka it ends. To find out how much space it has, we need to find it’s volume.

Volume is how much space an object has, like this box.

So, just like with anything else in science, we need proof, so we measure it.

We measure how long it is.

We measure how wide it is.

We measure how high it is.

Then you multiply it.

This is how much space this box fits. If I were to add the volume of all this other stuff, it would be more than what the box fits, proving that all the objects in there have mass, and it is more mass than the box can fit.

This goes with any container. Here I have this graduated cylinder. It’s called graduated because it has numbers going up the side of the cylinder, so it’s like it’s “graduating”. It measures up to this much in terms of volume. If I add water, it fills up the graduated cylinder.

Hey! We just proved water has mass too. And if it has mass, it matters.

So if you ever feel like you or things don’t matter, well, you do.

Because you take up space.

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