________________
142
THE JAINA PHILOSOPHY
with velocity becomes inapplicable Now we have seen that 'mass is not an intrinsic quality of paramāņu Mass, according to the Jain view is one of the four pairs of sparśas which are 1) hoi-cold 1) unctuous-dry 11) heavy-light and iv) hard-soft Paramāņus (and even material aggregates of some vargauās though composed of innumerable paraniāmus) are chatulisparsi ie are agurulagiu (literally neither heavy nor light) which means they are massless It would be interesting to mention here that some scientists like Gerald Feinberg think that there are particles (such as tachyon) which always travel faster than the speed of light 35
Can the existence of massless matter and speed faster than that of light be definitively refuted by modern science especially in view of the proliferation of we'rd subatomic particles (more than 15) discovered by it? “The new generation of qunatum physicists not accepting the atom as simply a miniature solar system in which negatively charged electrons circle the positively charged nucleus, have found the electrons keep jumping from one orbit into another without passing through the intervening space They have also succeeded in producing such ghostlike particles as the neutrino, which has no
35 There are particles, which at rest, would have no mass at all-a rest mass of zero light is made up of 'photons' parucles that have a proper mass of zero Other particles such as 'neutrinos' and 'gravitons' also have a proper mass of zero Particles with zero mass means that their inertia is zero and they can be accelerated to any velocity upto infinite In 1967, physicist Gerald Feinberg in discussing these faster-than-light particles called them 'tacliyons from a Greek word meaning speed "l-Isaac Asimoy SPAN magazine 16th July 1973)
