Where does our dough come from?

We form wrong relationships in our daily life the concept of mass with the word “weight”. If someone asks you, “How much do you weigh?” When they ask, that person is actually asking about your mass (measured in kilograms). Of course, the spoken language does not need to be corrected, we just need to know the difference. In physics, weight is the force (measured in Newtons) that a mass feels in the presence of a gravitational field..

As for the physical definition of mass, we can consider it from different angles.

But before answering the question in the title, we need to define the concept of mass. Mass is actually a primitive concept of our universe and may seem simple, but such concepts are in most cases the most complex to define.

In dictionaries, The word mass is defined as the amount of matter in an object.. And that’s a pretty intuitive conclusion most people come to when they take the time to think about this concept. However, when we consider it in more detail, this definition is rather vague.

If mass is a measure of the amount of matter, then an object has mass because it also has matter, right? When we say matter, we can think of the things around us and the atoms that make up ourselves.

Atoms are composed of subatomic particles such as electrons (the fundamental particles of our universe) and particles such as protons and neutrons; these, in turn, consist of even smaller particles such as quarks and gluons.

So where does the mass of these particles come from?

We examine the effects of Quantum Mechanics when we examine what happens to subatomic particles. In this area of ​​physics, our everyday experience of observing events cannot help, as the behavior of particles is very different from “expected” in various respects. This does not mean that we cannot explain and predict a wide variety of phenomena using this knowledge.

The particles that make up the universe can be simplifiedly divided into 2 groups: the group of matter particles and the group of force particles. Force particles (e.g. photons, which are the particles that make up light) have no mass by definition and can therefore travel through the universe at the highest permissible speed, that is, at the speed of light.

Particles related to matter “gain” their mass when they interact with what is called the Higgs field. We can make an analogy with our money. For money to have value, it must be placed in an economic system that permeates our society. So particles of matter (para) have mass only because they interact with the Higgs field (a system that permeates the universe). Since this field permeates the entire universe, all material particles gain mass in the same way..

However, if we add the mass given by the Higgs field to all the particles that make up the human being, we will see that we only reach 1% of the total mass value measured on the balance!!! This is because most of our mass is stored in the form of energy. To understand this, we need to refer to the most famous equation in the history of Physics, which is the subject of another article here.

Einstein’s equation shows us that there is an equivalence between mass and energy. And when it comes to the mass of objects in our universe, almost all of the value we measure is stored in the energy of the bonds that make up the atomic nucleus.. The result of this may seem rather strange, but it is extremely intriguing to think that most of our mass is not in the matter that makes us up, but in the energy stored in the empty space inside atoms.