By: Lyn

Lyn — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 13:49:35 +0000

Although I’ve heard something like this brfeoe, and even read articles by Frank Wilczak on the same subject, I still find Matthew Nobes’ comment hard to understand. A helium atom and a neutron weigh less than a deuterium atom and a tritium atom. The difference, the binding energy, is available to be released by a fusion interaction. Similarly, a neutron weighs more than a proton plus an electron plus a neutrino, and hence decays with a positive release of energy. The rule is mass of bound particle equals mass of constituents minus mass equivalent of binding energy. Therefore if two or three massless quarks are stably bound together with a positive binding energy, it would appear that the bound meson or nucleon should weigh less than zero. What gives? I guess it somehow relates to asymptotic freedom / infrared slavery and hence the quarks are only massless when confined, but are actually infinitely massive when deconfined. Could one then say that most of the mass comes from the fact that the quarks are only imperfectly confined? At least this way the binding energy has the right sign. In this way of speaking, the massless pion is massless only because the two infinitely massive quarks are bound together by an equally infinite amount of binding energy.Jim Graber

Comments on: Gravity Modification – What Went Wrong?

By: Lyn