Comment by hither_shores
3 years ago
> 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.
Circling back to my original question, is the system exhibiting behavior that does not agree with special relativity (vs Newtonian physics)?
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