Comment by hinkley
3 years ago
When two waves interact it's more like an elastic collision, isn't it?
From the article it wasn't clear to me if these extra high-energy particles they were seeing as fuzz in the data (which are heavier than a photon) are actually unexplained mass or a situation of conservation of energy meets special relativity (kinetic energy -> mass).
If you put enough energy into separating quarks, I'm told you get extra quarks. So an energetic system where the masses don't add up doesn't seem like an epoch defining mystery to me. So what are we missing?
> So an energetic system where the masses don't add up doesn't seem like an epoch defining mystery to me.
Bound states aren't really made of their constituents in a classical sense. A proton is a particular configuration of the quark fields (really it's more complicated than this), but not a simple sum of quark particle states. And in particular, its mass doesn't have to be the sum of the masses of particle states.
The mass+energy still have to sum up though, don't they?
The mass of what? There aren't literally three quarks inside a proton.
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