Einstein Albert Part - V

The origin and understanding of mass’ calculation

                        We let each segment of space-time keep track of how many Quarks and gluons it contains. We then treat these segments as an assembly of interacting subsystems.

                        In this context “we” means a collection of hard-working CPU’s of a large number of powerful computers in sync working at teraflop speeds for months at a time.They manage to calculate the mass of Quarks and Gluons.

                       

                        Quarks are subject, in particular, to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which tries to imply that if you try to pin down their position too precisely, their momentum will be wildly uncertain. To support the possibility of large momentum, they must acquire large energy. In other words, it takes work to pin Quarks down. Wavicles want to spread out. So there is a competition between two effects. To cancel the color change completely we would like to put together the quark and antiquark  at precisely the same place; but those wavicles resist localization, so the cancellation comes at a price.

                        A number of stable compromise solutions can be found, where the quark and the antiquark (or three quarks) are brought close together but not perfectly coincident. Their distribution is described by Quantum mechanical wave functions. Each possible stable wave-patterns corresponds to – indeed, in a profound sense  it is --  a different kind of particle that you can observe. There are patterns for protons and neutrons, and for each entry in our whole Greek and Latin smorgasbord. Each pattern has some characteristic energy, because the color fields are not entirely cancelled and because the wavicles are somewhat localized. And that energy, through Einstein’s m=E/c²,  is the origin of mass.

CONCLUSION: I again emphasize that our understanding of mass is not complete still. The value of the electron mass, in particular, remains deeply mysterious even in our most advanced speculations about the grand unification of fundamental forces and string theory.

Reference:

1. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.
2. “THE ORIGIN OF MASS” a Cover Story in Frontline  in WYP 2005.

                        

Einstein - Part I

EVERYDAY work on the frontiers of modern physics usually involves complex concepts and extreme conditions. We speak of quantum fields, entanglement or super symmetry, and analyze the ridiculously small or conceptualize the incomprehensibly large. Just as Willie Sutton famously explained that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is”, so we do these things because “that’s where the Unknown is”. It is an amazing and delightful fact, however, that occasionally this sophisticated work gives answers to childlike questions about familiar things. The world of quarks and gluons, casts brilliant new light on one such childlike question: What is the origin of mass?

            This is an especially appropriate topic for the World Year of Physics, because it relates so closely to the circle of ideas around Albert Einstein’s most famous equation , E = mc^2 . That equation, written in that form, immediately suggests the possibility of converting small quantities of mass into large quantities of energy – a suggestion that was realized, of course, with the development of nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. It is worth noting, however, that this is not the way the equation appears in Einstein’s original paper. In that paper you do not find E = mc^2 , but rather m = E/c^2. The difference is trivial algebraically, but profound conceptually, for the second (original) form of the equation suggests something quite different : the possibility to derive mass from energy. For a modern physicist , and even for Einstein in 1905, this sounds a deeper resonance. Energy appears a pervasive, primary concept in modern physics , and there is no real prospect of explaining it in terms of something more basic. For mass the situation is quite different. The title of Einstein’s paper is “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?”. It shows that from the beginning, Einstein was thinking about questioning the foundations of fundamental physics, not making bombs. Modern physics, as I shall now explain in my next post, answers his question with a resounding “Yes!”