Sunday, January 21, 2024

RECOMMENDED VIDEO: SABINE HOSSENFELDER ON WHY YOU HAVE MASS.

Sabine Hossenfelder is a theoretical physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies. I got to know her (well... not personally) via X/twitter and so discovered that she also has her own Youtube Channel, Science Without the Gobbledygook.


Maybe you heard left or right already that protons and neutrons are themselves composed of elementary particles called quarks. A proton e.g. is made up of one down and two up quarks. A neutron of one up and two down quarks. Quarks are not massless and their mass can be determined. Yet here's the thing: when these masses are added up, the result is nowhere near the well-known mass of a proton or a neutron. So where does the difference come from? Mrs Hossenfelder explains it in this video: other composite particles called pions, denoted with, you guess it, π, and made up of a quark and an anti-quark, are responsible for it:





You can follow Sabine on: @skdh


Nite.


MFBB.

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