Even if my quarks had zero mass in themselves, generating the strong nuclear pulls I need to make a proton will still take a bunch of energy. It comes from the amazing behavior of the strong nuclear force. Even moreso, I don't need a Higgs mechanism to generate this 99% of the proton mass. This extra energy isn't just some small correction, it's actually 99% of the energy of a proton.
These huge pulls have a lot of energy associated with them, and this means that if I need to make a proton, I have to provide enough energy for these huge pulls. (These pulls have so much energy that the are being converted constantly into particles and anti-particles for very brief periods of time).
If I'm looking closely enough to actually see these individual strong nuclear charges, then I can see the huge pulls that they're exerting on everything around them. What does this have to do with me being bad at math? Well, those quarks inside the proton have a strong nuclear charge. Okay, so the strong nuclear force is so strong, that it creates particles to cancel itself out over long distances. If I had a pair of particle have a strong nuclear charge, and I start pulling them apart, they would pull harder and harder and harder against me, until that pull takes so much energy, it turns into new particles (one particle and one anti-particle at a time) that cancel out the strong nuclear charge that I had. Any time I find the strong nuclear force working, it's sitting inside of some collection of particles where, over a long distance, their strong nuclear force cancels out.
I can't make a ball of strong nuclear charge. eep.Ĭlearly, we are not being torn apart by the strong nuclear force, and the reason is this. If I try to add all of those up, I get infinity. Now, there's a lot of space that's really far away that my strong force is pulling at harder and harder. If I do the same thing with the strong nuclear force, I find that the pull doesn't get weaker as I go far away, it gets stronger. This is how much 'energy' my ball of gravity-exerting-thing or ball of electricity-exerting-thing has. I can count up the total pull it can exert and, because it gets weaker as things get further away, I come to a finite answer. It sends out a pull to the rest of the universe that gets weaker and weaker as things get further away. In a sense it's infinitely strong: Here's the sense: Imagine I take a little ball something that exerts gravity, or electro-magentism. The strong nuclear force has it's name for a reason. To explain why, I need a second brief aside to explain the strong nuclear force. See, the proton is not just three little sterile balls sitting in a diagram. The proton seems to have a bunch of mass, but if i just weigh the pieces, I can't find it. Wait, I've screwed that up, let me try again Wikipedia will do.:Ī proton is made up of two up quarks and one down quark. So, we are made up of protons and neutrons, and protons and neutrons are made out of quarks, and the Higgs boson gives mass to quarks, done and done, right? What I really mean by 'Mass' in this context (and what physicists in general mean when they start talking about these scales), is 'The energy required to create something and then have it sit there', or rather 'the energy that is intrinsic to the particle itself, independent of what it's doing'. By this I mean that we are going to start using 'Mass' and 'Energy' interchangeably, E=mc 2 and all that. We're going to be living in Einstein-land for a second. We are, however, made up, largely, up composite particles: protons and neutrons.Ī brief aside before I dive into this. We can use the Higgs mechanism to give mass to fundamental particles: Quarks and electrons and W's and Z's. Also our dogs and houses and laptops and such. The Higgs mechanism isn't what gives us mass. The Extended Rant, written for a somewhat non-technical audience: The fraction of the proton mass which comes from its interaction with the Higgs mechanism is less than 1% TLDR We are protons and neutrons, which have mass because of the energy associated with the quantum chromodynamic interactions associated with its constituents. Bosch idos not dispensing fabric softener.After reading this one too many times from lazy physicists and and science-writers, we need to kill off this obnoxious phrase.
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