Brzusa

I had the same thought today regarding mass loss of chemical reactions and after finding your thread on google I decided to sign up to share my thoughts. Lets consider a simple reaction such as CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O We are often taught that the mass is conservative as all particles are accounted for, but what if the mass (as has been stated earlier in this forum) changes for the electrons in different potentials throughout the orbitals? Since energy is mass, that could account for the mass difference in chemical reactions. Higher energy electrons are more massive and when stabilized in a lower energy bond, release their a part of their "mass". I thought about how to prove such and idea and thought about JJ Thompson's experiment and the LHC: Imagine applying an electric potential an atom and removing the furthermost electron as JJ thompson did in his experiments you can now measure the mass of this electron as a beam. We now for a fact that electrons become more massive as they gain Kinetic energy (accelerating them to close to the speed of light as is done in the large hadron collider). Since potential and kinetic energies are usually interchangeable consider the electron's mass to be proportionate to the potential energies of the nucleus. Lets now imagine that the possibility of weighing a single electron within different orbitals of the carbon atom. The inner most electrons would weigh less than those farthest from the nucleus. Thank you for reading my thoughts.