What is Mass? And Where Does it come from?
We tend to think of mass as weight? So for example, you might weigh a 150 lbs. An elephant might weigh 12,000 lbs. But On the moon you would weigh 25 lbs, and the elephant would weigh only 2000 lbs. So is your mass 25 lbs or 150 lbs – neither. You weight is not your mass.
The force of gravity acting on your mass is what gives you weight.
Your mass is the amount of stuff that your body is made of. It’s your body’s resistance to motion or a measurement of the number of atoms you are composed of. If you counted up the mass of all the atoms in your body, that’s what your mass would be.
Ok, but where does the mass of the atom come from?
You might think that I am going to reference the so called God particle or the Higgs Boson as the particle that gives all fundamental particles mass. The Higgs field is only partly responsible for mass – in fact, only about 2 % of the mass of the universe is directly due to the Higgs field.
Where does the other 98% come from?
Let’s take a closer look at the atom. Atoms are composed of Protons and Neutrons in the nucleus, with an electron cloud whizzing at high speeds around it.
But the mass of the electron is only 0.05% of the total mass of the atom. It is so small compared to the mass of the nucleus, that for our purposes here, we can ignore it. So let’s look at the nucleus of the atom only, which is responsible for 99.95% of the mass of the atom.
It is composed of Protons and Neutrons, both of which have about the same amount of mass. So let’s look at just the proton.
Where do protons get their mass?
If you go inside the protons, you will find that they are fundamentally made up of three even smaller particles called quarks whizzing around each other. But the problem is when we measure the actual mass of the these three quarks – 2 Up, and 1 Down quark – their combined mass only accounts for about 2% of the mass of the proton.
So where is the other 98% of the mass coming from, if there are no other particles inside the proton?
Well this is the amazing part. The three quarks inside the proton and neutrons are whizzing around each other at nearly the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second, in a very tight space.
Their orbits are only about one quadrillionth (0.000000000000001) of a meter, or 1 X10-15 meters across. Particles with mass travelling that fast have a lot of kinetic energy.
In addition, when things are whizzing around each other so fast, there has to be a lot of force binding them together or they would fly apart – kind of like the sun keeps the orbits of the planets from flying apart.
This means there is energy in the form of potential energy binding the nucleus together. Now if you go back to Einsteins famous equation E = MC2 — by rearranging the equation to read:
M = E/C2 – what you find is that the mass is actually coming from the kinetic and potential energy of these quarks whizzing around each other at high speed.
So the vast majority of the mass of particles at the fundamental level is nothing but energy swarming around inside the nucleus of atoms…that manifests itself as mass. And gravity acting on this mass results in your weight.
So all the “stuff” that you can see in the universe – like the stars, planets, comets, etc., including your weight, is a result of kinetic and potential energy trapped inside protons and neutrons.
Now do you think in the future we might have some kind of diet that reduces our weight by getting rid of some of that quark energy…hmmm? You never know.
