Your Mass is NOT From the Higgs Boson

Key Takeaways

[Applause] 21 G that is the mass of all of the electrons in your body if like me you weigh about 70 kg now all of that mass comes from the higs mechanism which means that as your electrons are traveling through SpaceTime they interact with the higs field and it's that that gives them their Mass it slows them down and stops them from traveling at the speed of light but most of your mass doesn't come from the higs mechanism and neither does all of the stuff that you see around you the mass is coming from somewhere quite different and that's because most of your mass and most of this mass comes from neutrons and protons and they're not fundamental particles they're made of constituent particles called quarks now the theory that describes quarks and their interactions with each other through gluons is called Quantum chromodynamics and Chromo is the Greek word for color so in some way these objects are meant to carry the color charge but they are much much smaller than the wavelength of visible light so there is no way that they are actually colored but it's a useful analogy that helps us think about how they interact and the particles that they can make up now the rules are pretty simple in order for a particle to exist it must be colorless or white like this house now you can accomplish that in two different ways you could make three quirks where each one is a different color red green and blue so overall they combine to produce white or you could use a quark and an anti- Quark where one is a color like green and and the other is its anti color say magenta now what I'd like to do on this little patch of beach behind me is simulate how quirks actually bind together and form different particles now for this you need to remember that in the last video we talked about how empty space is not truly empty so the beach here has these undulations in it which represent the fluctuations in the glue on field but you have to imagine this beach sort of Rippling in these bumps coming and going now that's really important because to get rid of those fluctuations actually takes energy and this is an important part of binding the quarks together the existence of quirks actually supresses the gluon fluctuations and creates what's called a flux tube an area where there is really nothing in the vacuum and that's IM between this quark and the antiquark and that pairs them up and creates what's called a Mison the Quark antiquark pair what's interesting about the flux tube is that as these quirks become more separated the flux tube Remains the Same diameter and the same of depth of suppression of the field which means that the force doesn't actually increase it's not like a spring it's not like an elastic band the force is the same that is pulling these quirks back together but you are putting more work in as you move these quirks and any quirks further apart and so for a time people thought well these quirks are always going to be confined however far you move them you're just going to get a really long flux tube but what actually happens is that you put in enough energy that you can actually create a quirk antiquark pair nevertheless the quirks you still confined you can never see an individual cork because if you try to pull it out you'll put so much energy into the situation that another cork any cork pair will be created now to form a proton we're going to need an up Cork another up Cork and a down Quirk now the standard model of a proton that you've probably seen involves these quirks bounded together by little glue on Springs that go between them we know that that picture is totally wrong now even in the best sense you might have hope that you would see Flex tubes around the edge of the triangle but uh we know that in fact they don't do that that you get these y-shaped Flex tubes the crazy thing about a proton is that there may be more than three quarks there you see you can have additional Quark anti- Quark pairs pop in and out of existence so at any given time there could be five or seven or nine any odd number of quarks could make up the proton so this is what a proton actually looks like you can see that the quirks like to sit on those lumps in the gluon field and you can see the two up quirks and a down Quirk but there's also a strange Quirk and an anti-st strange Quirk which is strange because you don't normally think of these quirks being inside a proton but they can be at any particular point in time you can also see that these quirks have cleared out the vacuum and you can see there's kind of these flux tubes which are the areas where the gluon field has been suppressed and that's really what's binding these quirk together that's the strong force that binds quarts into the heart of the proton it is intrinsically related to the fact that clearing out those fluctuations has more energy than where they are that's right it costs energy to clear the vacuum so where is the mass the Proton really coming from well of course the constituent quirks do interact with the higs field and that gives them a small amount of mass but if you add up the mass of all the quirks in the the proton it would only account for about 1% of its total mass so where's the rest of the mass coming from the answer is energy you know Einstein's famous equation eal mc^ 2 well that says we got a lot of energy for just a little bit of mass but if you rearrange the equation you can see that we can get an amount of mass if there is lots of energy there and that is really where most of the mass of the proton is coming from it's from the fact that there are these energy fluctu in the gluon field and the quirks are interacting with those gluons that is where your mass is coming from it's coming from the energy that's in there you know Einstein talked about well if I had a hot cup of tea it would actually have a slightly greater mass than the same cup of tea when cold and he was right I mean you can't measure it with a cup of tea but most of your mass you owe to eal mc^ 2 you owe to the fact that your mass is packed with energy because of the interactions between the quirks and these glue GL on fluctuations in that glue on field I think it's extraordinary because what we think of as ordinarily empty space you know that turns out to be the thing that gives us all most of our Mass I really want to thank audible.com for supporting this episode of veritasium in case you don't know audible.com is a leading provider of audiobooks with over a 100,000 titles in all areas of literature including fiction non-fiction and periodicals you know one of my favorite books is by James Gleek it's it's called the information a history a theory a flood and if you head on over to audible.com/veritasium you can download it right now for free or you can pick another book of your choosing you know it's great to have support from people like audible because that allows me to keep making this content for you for free so please go check it out