For some of you who are science fans, when I ask the above question you might answer that our mass comes from the Higgs boson. You are probably right. But that’s not the whole story though.
Higgs boson gives mass to the elementary particles like quarks, leptons and bosons. And we are all made of elementary particles so all our mass should come from Higgs boson, right? No, it isn’t right. But that’s the question I asked myself a while ago.
See, elementary particles like quarks, leptons etc are not stationary, they are moving randomly at very high speed, near the speed of light to be specific. Yeah atoms, molecules, they hardly move but inside neutrons and protons, there are quarks. And quarks are moving randomly at near the speed of light. And the reason why they don’t get knock off is because of the strong nuclear force. When the quarks are very near, they experience no force. But when they are far apart, the force becomes exponentially stronger and pull them inside with a great force.
Now, back to the main question. When scientists calculated our mass using the mass of all the quarks ( about 4.2*10^29) in our body, it turns out only to be about 2% of our total mass. So, where is our 98% mass?
You have to thank Einstein for your 98% mass. Remember his famous equation E = mc^2, so a sufficiently large amount of energy can be converted into considerable amount of mass. Again, remember, quarks are moving at near the speed of light, so it has lots of kinetic energy and there about 4.2*10^29 quarks in our body. Do the math and it is an awfully large amount of energy. Convert in into mass using m=E/c^2 and it accounts for 98% of our mass.
Before you go away, don’t forget to thank Einstein.
Disclaimer: The number of quarks in our body I used is calculated indirectly from the number of atoms in our body. And there is no scientific paper to prove this number. This is just a approximate. So, please be warned before using for any scientific works.
Knowledge Glutton 