Like a marriage or partnership or friendship perhaps? I can see that being particularly true when "opposites" who attract outlive their ability to interact and go their separate ways. Each is a great person. Together they suck! It happens. Thank you for your reply Walt! :)
If I take you literally, the the mass of the whole will always be equal to that of the parts. If figuratively, one must come up with a definition of 'whole'.
I am not the one who thought that up E. Take baking a cake. It is comprised of a variety of ingredients. Individually it is cake flour and sugar and spices and extracts and milk or some other kind of liquid and eggs and maybe other things like orange rind and walnuts. Put them on a counter. OR Combine all of them, bake the cake, put it on the counter. Now is this a case of the sum of the parts being transformed into something else entirely which one might well say is "more" than the sum of the parts? Or take a car .Break it all down into its components. Lots of metal lying around. What do you do with it? OR you can put them all together on a production line and the final product is a vehicle people can get into and drive to and from other places. That is not figurative at all. It is literal. Or building a house. Same thing. You say there is nothing greater there than the component parts. I say there is. Different strokes. Thank you for your challenge. Did I meet it or blow it? :(
This post was edited by RosieG at May 20, 2019 8:51 AM MDT
Greater is a much better word and fit's well for a figurative answer. By the way, a cooking cake loses mass as carbon dioxide and water vapor, so it actually weighs less than the batter.
Walt O'Reagun 