The shocking source of all mass - It's Not What you Think. Where does mass come from?

We tend to think of mass as weight.

So for example, you might weigh 150 pounds.

An elephant might weigh 12,000 pounds.

But on the moon, you would weigh only 25 pounds, and the elephant would weigh only 2,000 pounds.

So is your mass 25 pounds or 150 pounds? Neither.

Your 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.

Okay, but where does the mass of the atom come from? I'll explain in the next three minutes.

You might think that I'm going to reference the so-called God particle or the Higgs boson as the particle that gives all fundamental particles their mass.

The Higgs boson, of which the Higgs field is composed of, 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 mass of the atom.

It is so small compared to the mass of the nucleus that for all purposes we can ignore it.

So let's look at the nucleus of the atom, 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 these three quarks, which is, by the way, two up and one down quark, their combined mass is only 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.