Why does matter have mass

Light has the same speed no matter what frame of reference you are in. But the driver of the car would still see that the light moving ahead of them at the speed of light. This is only possible if their time appears to slow down relative to you, and you and the people in the car can no longer agree on how long a second would take to pass.

So the light appears to be moving away from them more slowly, but as they experience things more slowly it all evens out. This also affects their apparent mass. If they step on the gas, they will speed up more slowly than you would expect. So relativity requires that the faster an object moves, the more mass it appears to have. How does that happen? We only know that it does.

The same effect occurs with quantum particles, and not just with light. A neutron, for example, can decay into a proton, electron and anti-neutrino. The mass of these three particles is less than the mass of a neutron, so they each get some energy as well. So energy and matter are really the same thing. Completely interchangeable. And finally, Although energy and mass are related through special relativity, mass and space are related through general relativity.

You can define any mass by a distance known as its Schwarzschild radius, which is the radius of a black hole of that mass. So in a way, energy, matter, space and time are all aspects of the same thing. What do you think? And if you like what you see, come check out our Patreon page and find out how you can get these videos early while helping us bring you more great content! Podcast audio : Download Duration: — 3. Podcast video : Download Duration: — I do understand that a car that hits you at miles per hour do more damage than the same car hitting you at 10 miles………uh……ohhhhhhh I see now!

The new particle appears to share many of the same qualities as the one predicted by Scottish physicist Peter Higgs and others and is perhaps the biggest accomplishment at CERN since its founding in outside Geneva along the Swiss-French border.

Rolf Heuer, director of CERN, said the newly discovered particle is a boson, but he stopped just shy of claiming outright that it is the Higgs boson itself - an extremely fine distinction. We have observed a new particle that is consistent with a Higgs boson. The Higgs, which until now had been purely theoretical, is regarded as key to understanding why matter has mass, which combines with gravity to give all objects weight. The idea is much like gravity and Isaac Newton's early theories.

Gravity was there all the time before Newton explained it. The Higgs boson was believed to be there, too. And now that scientists have actually seen something much like it, they can put that knowledge to further use.

School physics teaches that everything is made up of atoms, and inside atoms are electrons, protons and neutrons. They, in turn, are made of quarks and other subatomic particles. However, neutrons are slightly more massive than protons—and this difference is crucial. The process of neutrons decaying into protons promotes chemistry, and thus, biology.

If protons were heavier, they would instead decay into neutrons, and the universe as we know it would not exist. This is why the tiny difference between proton and neutron mass exists. There may be an exception: neutrinos. Neutrinos are in a class by themselves; they have extremely tiny masses a million times smaller than the electron, the second lightest particle , are electrically neutral and rarely interact with matter. Scientists are puzzled as to why neutrinos are so light. Theorists are currently considering multiple possibilities.

It might be explained if neutrinos are their own antiparticles—that is, if the antimatter version is identical to the matter version. If physicists discover that this is the case, it would mean that neutrinos get their mass from somewhere other than the Higgs boson, which physicists discovered in Neutrinos must get their mass from a Higgs-like field, which is electrically neutral and spans the entire universe.

This could be the same Higgs that gives mass to the other elementary particles, or it could be a very distant cousin. In some theories, neutrino mass also comes from an additional, brand new source that could hold the answers to other lingering particle physics mysteries.