Your Mass is NOT From the Higgs Boson

Twenty-one grams. That's the

mass

of all the electrons in

your

body if, like me, you weigh about 70 kilograms. Now all the

mass

comes from the Higgs mechanism, which means that as

your

electrons travel through spacetime, they interact with the Higgs field and that's what gives them their mass. It slows them down and prevents them from traveling at the speed of light. But most of its mass does not come from the Higgs mechanism. And neither do all these things you see around you. The mass comes from somewhere quite different and that's because most of its mass and most of this mass comes from neutrons and protons and they are not fundamental particles.

They are made up of constituent particles called quarks. Now the theory that describes quarks and their interactions with each other through gluons is called quantum chromodynamics. And chrome is the Greek word for color. So in some ways these objects are meant to carry the charge of color. But they are much, much smaller than the wavelength of visible light, so there is no way they are actually colored, but it is a useful analogy to help us think about how they interact and the particles they can form. Now the rules are pretty simple. For a particle to exist it must be colorless or white, like this house.

Now you can achieve this in two different ways. You could create three quarks where each one is a different color, red, green and blue, so that they generally combine to produce white. Or you could use a quark and an antiquark where one is a color like green and the other is its anticolor, say, magenta. Now what I would like to do on this little piece of beach behind me is simulate how quarks actually come together and form different particles. Now, for this you have to remember that in the last video we talked about how empty space is not really empty.

So the beach here has these ripples that represent fluctuations in the gluon field. But you have to imagine this beach undulating and these potholes coming and going. That's really important, because getting rid of those fluctuations actually takes energy. And this is an important part of uniting quarks. The existence of quarks actually suppresses the fluctuations of the gluons and creates what is called a flux tube, a zone where there is really nothing in the vacuum and which lies between this quark and the antiquark. And that pairs them up and creates what's called a meson, the quark-antiquark pair.

The interesting thing about that flux tube is that as these quarks get further apart, the flux tube still has the same diameter and the same kind of depth of field suppression, which means that the force doesn't actually increase. It's not like a spring. It's not like a rubber band. The force is the same that brings these quarks back together. But you're working harder as you push these quarks and antiquarks further apart. And so, for a while people thought: Well, these quarks will always be confined, no matter how far you move them. You will get a really long flow tube.

But what really happens is that you put in enough energy to be able to create a couple of quarks and antiquarks. However, the quarks are still combined. You can never see an individual quark, because if you try to extract it, you put so much energy into the situation that another pair of quarks and antiquarks will be created. Now, to form a proton, we will need an up quark, another up quark, and a down quark. Now, the standard model of a proton that you've probably seen involves these quarks held together by little springs of gluons that go between them.

We know that image is now totally wrong. Even in the best sense, you might have expected to see flux tubes around the edge of the triangle. But we know that, in fact, they don't. You get these flexible Y-shaped tubes. The crazy thing about a proton is that there can be more than three quarks in there. You see, you can have additional pairs of quarks and antiquarks that appear and disappear. So at any given time there could be five, seven or nine, any odd number of quarks could form a proton. This is what a proton really looks like.

You can see that the quarks like to sit in those clumps in the gluon field. And you can see the two up quarks and one down quark, but there's also a strange quark and a strange antiquark, which is strange, because you don't normally think of these quarks as being inside a proton, but they can be at any particular time. And you can also see that these quarks have cleared the vacuum. And you can see that there are sort of flux tubes that are the areas where the gluon field has been suppressed. And that's really what brings these quarks together.

That is the strong force that binds the quarks to the heart of the proton. It's intrinsically related to the fact that removing those fluctuations has more energy than where they are. That's correct. It costs energy to clear the void. So where does the mass of the proton really come from? Well, of course, the constituent quarks interact with the Higgs field and that gives them a small amount of mass. But if you add up the mass of all the quarks in the proton, it would only represent about one percent of its total mass. So where does the rest of the dough come from?

The answer is: energy. You know, Einstein's famous equation: E equals mc squared. Well, that means we have a lot of energy for just a little bit of mass. But if you rearrange the equation you can see that we can get a certain amount of mass if there is a lot of energy there. And that's really where most of the proton's mass comes from. It's due to the fact that there are these energy fluctuations in the gluon field and the quarks interact with those gluons. That's where your dough comes from. It comes from the energy that is there.

You know, Einstein talked about how if he drank a cup of hot tea, it would actually have a slightly larger mass than the same cup of cold tea. And he was right. I mean, you can't measure it with a cup of tea, but you owe most of your mass to E equals mc squared, you owe it to the fact that your mass is full of energy, due to the interactions between the quarks and these gluon fluctuations in that gluon field. I think it's extraordinary, because what we normally think of as empty space, you know, turns out to be what gives us all most of our mass.

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