Why does matter have mass

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.

This new mechanism may also be related to how dark matter, which physicists think is made up of yet undiscovered particles, gets its mass. Just over 40 years ago, a new theory about the early universe provided a way to tackle multiple cosmological conundrums at once. That coevolution continues today.

Learn about the Standard Model of particle physics and how physicists use it to predict the subatomic future. Only a fraction of collision events that look like they produce a Higgs boson actually produce a Higgs boson. Physicists see top quarks and Higgs bosons emanating from the same collisions in new results from the Large Hadron Collider.

But every other second at the LHC, they do. The announcement on July 4 was just one part of the story. Take a peek behind the scenes of the discovery of the Higgs boson. The strong force and you The Higgs field gives mass to fundamental particles—the electrons, quarks and other building blocks that cannot be broken into smaller parts.

But what about neutrinos? 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. Scientists have long puzzled over how these minute building blocks of the universe acquire mass. Without mass, particles wouldn't hold together and there would be no matter. One theory proposed by British physicist Peter Higgs and teams in Belgium and the United States in the s is that a new particle must be creating a "sticky" field that acts as a drag on other particles.

Find latest and upcoming tech gadgets online on Tech2 Gadgets. Popular gadgets including laptop, tablet and mobile specifications, features, prices, comparison. Rising temperatures can cause heat waves: Here are three tips to prevent heat stroke. The mass is then independent of velocity and is closer to the old Newtonian concept. In that case, only the total of energy and mass would be conserved, but it seems better to try to keep the conservation of energy.

The interpretation most widely used is a compromise in which mass is invariant and always has energy so that total energy is conserved but kinetic energy and radiation does not have mass. The distinction is purely a matter of semantic convention.

Sometimes people ask "If light has no mass how can it be deflected by the gravity of a star? One answer is that all particles, including photons, move along geodesics in general relativity and the path they follow is independent of their mass. The deflection of starlight by the sun was first measured by Arthur Eddington in The result was consistent with the predictions of general relativity and inconsistent with the newtonian theory. Another answer is that the light has energy and momentum which couples to gravity.

The energy-momentum 4-vector of a particle, rather than its mass, is the gravitational analogue of electric charge. The corresponding analogue of electric current is the energy-momentum stress tensor which appears in the gravitational field equations of general relativity.

The energy and momentum of light also generates curvature of spacetime, so general relativity predicts that light will attract objects gravitationally. This effect is far too weak to have yet been measured. The gravitational effect of photons does not have any cosmological effects either except perhaps in the first instant after the Big Bang.

And there seem to be far too few with too little energy to make any noticeable contribution to dark matter. For an alternative viewpoint of relativistic mass, see the article by T.