[Pmb]

Ah true, I did misquote you.  Sorry for that.

My point still stands in roughly the same form.  If you list a bunch of defining characteristics of mass that preclude another definition of mass, then of course it has little or nothing to do with those characteristics.  Though I would argue that the use of invariant mass does meet the kinematical characteristics of mass, since classically, inertial mass in Newton's second law, F=ma, can be replaced in the four-vector version with invariant mass, and it's particularly elegant to view the transition to special relativity geometrically in terms of 4-vectors. 

Yup. And all of that is stated in my paper.

This is related to a new idea that I came up with. I call it the principle of controlled igorance. It states that physicists write with given assumptions that are agreed among their peers. E.g. what one person uses as the definition of the term momentum might be different that what someone else uses. Someone who works in classical mechanics will define momentum, when unqualified by anything, as p = mv. But another person working in quantum mechanics will define it as being identical to canonical momentum.

I'll check out your paper when I have a chance.  I've got a backlog of reading to do at the moment. 

Very cool. Thanks!

[Pmb]

I’d like to add one thing. And that’s the importance of know what all these terms mean. If you don’t know what it means then you certainly can’t follow a discussion about how to measure these things. E.g. by hypothesis we assume that a bodies inertial mass is proportional to its passive gravitation mass. But we have to measure these things in order to verify the theory.

Clifford M. Will wrote a wonderful article called The Confrontation between General Relativity and Experiment
It’s online at http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0510072