One of the things that I think I find kind of most remarkable about what
modern physics has to tell us is the very nature of the elementary particles
that make up material substance. Stuff like water for example is made of
molecules H2O. We know that those hydrogen and oxygen atoms are made of
nuclei and electrons. We know the nuclei are in turn composed of protons and
neutrons. In the last 40 or 50 years we learned that protons and neutrons are
themselves not elementary particles - they're actually composites made of up
and down quarks and one of the really interesting aspects of this story, in a
sense, is first of all that the theories don't hang together at all, in
fact they don't even predict particles with mass unless we imagine that there
exists this rather mystical quantum field that spreads throughout space-time
called the Higgs field and the characteristic fluctuation of the Higgs
field is this thing called the Higgs Boson.We know from the discovery at CERN
in Geneva in 2012 that the Higgs Boson really does exist and the purpose of the
Higgs field is to give elementary particles their mass. That in itself
though doesn't explain quite what's going on with the mass of ordinary
substance. Take a proton, two up quarks and a down quark. If we add up the masses of
the individual quarks we get only 1% of the total mass of the proton. Where's the
rest of it? is a, you know, legitimate question and it turns out that we can
actually understand where the rest of that mass is gone - it's present in the
energy of the quantum field of the gluons that help bind the quarks
together inside the proton. Now Einstein's famous equation E=MC
squared was actually never given in his original
1905 paper in quite that form. In fact the equation that he gave was M (mass) is
equal to E divided by C squared. The mass of a body, an object, is a measure of its
energy content and that is the real revelation of Einstein's famous equation.
So the mass of everyone, all substance, is in fact to be found in the energy of
the quantum fields that hold matter together.
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