On Sun, 12 Apr 2026 23:52:46 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D?Oliveiro
<
ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
On 12 Apr 2026 14:38:14 GMT, Stefan Ram wrote:
Only about 1-9% of the mass of everyday objects comes from the Higgs
field. The remaining ~91-99% comes from the energy of the strong
nuclear force (quantum chromodynamics, or QCD) that binds quarks
together inside protons and neutrons.
I think quarks actually have more mass than the particles they make
up.
Why are there no free quarks? Why are they always bound into
multiquark particles? Because the force between them is so strong, the
energy you put in trying to pull them apart creates more quarks, which
means you just end up with more multiquark particles, and no free
quarks.
This eventually has some interesting thoughts about quarks: <
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/particle-collider-shuts-down-brookha
search for "quark-gluon plasma" and you will find this:
But in a scientific shocker, the state of matter RHIC found was not a
gas of free-floating quarks and gluons, as scientists expected the
quark-gluon plasma to be. Instead, the quarks and gluons interacted
with one another as in a liquid. In fact, RHIC revealed, the
quark-gluon plasma is a near-perfect liquid, meaning that it has
vanishingly small viscosity and can flow with almost no resistance.
?It has a very distinct persona,? Deshpande says. ?It likes to
flow.?
Note that these are quarks and gluons /outside/ the proton.
and the there is "color glass condensate", which the replacement to
the Brookhaven collider will explore:
When studied at low energies, protons appear as simple, three-quark
objects. At higher energies, the sea of transient quarks and
antiquarks comes into play. At the highest energies, like those at
RHIC and eventually the Electron-Ion Collider, scientists believe the
proton becomes clogged with multitudes of gluons, making a dense wall
called a color glass condensate.
and then there is this:
Perhaps the weirdest thing about the color glass condensate is that
when the gluons condense into these globs, they somehow shake off
their quantum nature. ?You think of the stuff inside a proton as being
this intensely quantum mechanical stuff, right? All these quarks and
gluons kind of fluctuating around,? Venugopalan says. But, he says,
the ?globs of glue? that make up the color glass condensate behave
like classical, not quantum, objects. That means studying the color
glass condensate could also help scientists study where the boundary
lies between the quantum world and the classical world, another major
quandary of physics.
which I presume is based on math, since the color glass condensate has
yet to be produced.
That's wierder that usual for quantum mechanics: at a certain energy
level, the proton is made up, not of quarks and gluons, but of things
that act like condensate matter.
And some people think that it really /isn't/ "turtles all the way
down" -- that is, they thing that exploring such items as the
structure of the proton will eventually produce a complete
understanding with no lower levels to explore.
Note: as I am a subscriber, even though I was able to access the
article without signing in, there is no guarantee that non-subscribers
can do so (this depends on the article).
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"
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