These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
The Origin of
Mass Newton's mass was an arbitrary concept.
Einstein tried to explain it in terms of energy.
Quantum Chromodynamics suggests that most of what we call "matter" is
not all that material, because a body is made of elementary
"particles" that are almost mass-less (for example, the proton is
made of two quarks, whose combined masses are about 1% of the mass of the
proton, and of gluons, which are mass-less). Newton believed that mass could not
be created: it was always conserved. Einstein showed that energy can turn into
mass and viceversa. That opened the possibility that mass might not be a
primitive element, but might be "created"; that there is an origin of
mass. The US physicist Frank Wilczek visualizes the origin of mass in a compromise that Nature has to
strike between two opposing principles: on one hand Nature wants a quark and an
anti-quark to be as near as possible to minimize the energy required (the
strong/color force increases with distance) but pinpointing an anti-quark's
position next to its quark would require an infinite amount of energy (as per
Heisenberg's uncertainty
principle); and viceversa (the energy is minimal when the two particles are let
loose in the universe, but then the strong force between them would become
infinite). The compromise between these two extremes is the mass of the proton. Noting that
photons become heavy inside (electric) superconductors (or, better, that an
observer inside a superconductor would perceive a photon as a massive
particle), Wilczek derives the analogy that we live inside a (non-electric)
superconductor within which particles (and then objects) acquire mass. That
"superconductor" is made of the Higgs condensate, which is made from the Higgs particle. This model seems
to point towards a deeper truth. Since Quantum Physics predicts that empty
space is inherently unstable, both Newton's absolute space and Einstein's relative spacetime (that
defied common sense by assuming action at a distance) are being replaced by the
vision of a space that is full of spontaneous activity, that seems to have a
life of its own. In fact, there seems to be layers of activity that take place
in spite of the laws of Physics at our layer. That activity is not irrelevant:
it might determine what happens at our layer. These "condensates"
arise from empty space, which behaves like a superconductor of a new kind. One
theory is that the metric field of General Relativity should also obey the same
laws, and therefore be "inhabited" by quantum fluctuations, and be
made of yet another kind of "condensate". After all, Einstein's
cosmological constant (if it is indeed needed) would de facto represent an
intrinsic property of space. Back to the beginning of the chapter "The New Physics" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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