Mass giving Mechanism

You step on a scale and look down at the number that shows up. What that number is telling you is how much force the mass of your body exerts on the ground. It's simple Newtonian mechanics: Force equals mass times acceleration. Gravity exerts the acceleration, and the mass of your body creates a force - that's your weight.

Weight is probably easy enough to understand, but mass is a little more nebulous. If you were floating in space far away from Earth, you would essentially have no weight, but you would still have the same mass as you did standing on that scale. Where does the mass of your body come from? Well, the mass comes from all the atoms in your body that individually have a mass.

Where does an atom's mass come from? Well, this is interesting because the mass of an atom at its core is really energy. In fact, all mass is energy. This is exemplified in Einstein's famous mass-energy equivalence equation: E=MC². Mass is interchangeable with energy, and the constant c² or speed of light squared is the conversion factor.

So where is the energy of the atom coming from? Well, 99% of the mass of an atom is contained in the binding energy within the nucleus. This energy is a result of one of the four fundamental forces of nature called the strong force, which keeps the protons and neutrons glued together in the nucleus of atoms. That's where most of your body's so-called mass resides. But it turns out that some of your mass, about one percent, is contained in the mass of the subatomic particles that make up the atoms. These are the electrons that form a cloud around the nucleus, as well as the quarks that make up the protons and neutrons.

So now the question is: how did these subatomic particles have an intrinsic mass? If mass is energy, then what is the mechanism that confers this energy to these fundamental particles? This is where the Higgs field comes into the picture. This field is everywhere in space-time, but most explanations of how this field confers mass can't avoid getting highly technical, talking about symmetry breaking and other advanced mathematical concepts.

In this video, I'm going to attempt to explain how the Higgs field confers mass in an intuitive way, so whether you're a math geek or not, you will hopefully get a very good intuitive understanding of what's really going on. That's coming up right now.

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