The virus of relativistic mass in the year of physics

The \famous formula " E = mc2 and the concept of \relativistic mass " increasing with velocity, which follows from it, are historical artifacts, contradicting the basic symmetry of Einstein's Special Relativity, the symmetry of 4-dimensional space-time. The relation discovered by Einstein is not E = mc2, but E0 = mc2, where E0 is the energy of a free body at rest introduced by Einstein in 1905. The source of the longevity of the \famous formula " is the irresponsible attitude of relativity theory experts to the task of explaining it to the non-experts. The notion of \relativistic mass " presents a kind of pedagogical virus which very eectively infects new generations of students and professors and shows no signs of decline. Moreover in the Year of Physics it threatens to produce a real pandemia. Before writing my rst article against the \Einstein famous equation E = mc2 " I mentioned in 1987 this intention to Volodya Gribov in one of our daily conversations. We had a complete unanimity on the issue of physics. But Volodya was a better friend of mine than I myself. And his understanding of life was better than mine. Therefore he tried to dissuade me from wasting my time on a ght against an obviously wrong cliche, which I would inevitably loose. I discarded his wise advice and wrote my rst two papers on the concept of mass 1;2. The subject seemed important to me because it concerned the proper teaching of special relativity at high schools, colleges and universities and explaining its genuine meaning to a wide audience of non-physicists, the so-called \pedestrians " in popular science magazines and books. The task looked also not absolutely formidable because a consistent pre-sentation of relativity existed for a long time in the world-wide accepted text-book by Landau and Lifshitz 3, which was the basis of my own under-standing, and in some other text-books. The paper was written for the Gribov Memorial Volume dedicated to the 75th birthda