Origin of Mass.pdfVIP

Frank Wilczek The Origin of Mass E veryday work at the frontiers of modern physics usually involves complex concepts and extreme conditions.We speak of quantum ?elds, entanglement, or supersymmetry, 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. Here I’d like to describe how myown work on subnuclear forces, the world of quarks and gluons, casts brilliant new light on one such child-like question: What is the origin of mass? 24 ) wilczek mit physics annual 2003 Has Mass an Origin? That a question makes grammatical sense does not guarantee that it is answerable, or even coherent. The concept of mass is one of the ?rst things we discuss in my freshman mechanics class. Classical mechanics is, literally, unthinkable without it. Newton’s second law of motion says that the acceleration of a body is given by dividing the force acting upon it by its mass. So a bodywithout mass wouldn’t know how to move, because you’d be dividing by zero.Also, in Newton’s law of gravity, the mass of an object governs the strength of the force it exerts. One cannot build up an object that gravitates, out of material that does not, so you can’t get rid of mass without getting rid of gravity. Finally, the most basic feature of mass in classical mechanics is that it is conserved. For example, when you bring together two bodies, the total mass is just the sum of the individual masses. This assumption is so deeply ingrained that it was not even explicitly formulated as a law. (Though I teach it as Newton’s Zeroth Law.) Altogether, in the Newtonian framework it is dif?cult to imagine what would constitute an “origin of mass,’’ or even what this phrase could possib