Relativistic Mass

On the one hand, the physics community is divided—some over-confident colleagues (mostly particle physicists) firmly reject the concept of relativistic massConcept of relativistic mass (e.g., in papers entitled “The Virus of Relativistic MassVirus of relativistic mass in the Year of Physics” [15]), whereas what appears to be the majority of physicists continue to regard it as an integral part of spacetime physics including even in introductory textbooks and books published in the last several years (e.g., [17–26]). On the other hand, both mass and relativistic mass are equally supported by the experimental evidence—since mass is defined as the measure of the resistance a particle offers to its acceleration (which is the accepted definition based on the experimental evidence) and since it is also an experimental fact that a particle’s resistance to its acceleration increases as the particle’s velocity increases,Acceleration it does follow that the particle’s mass increases when its velocity increases.