Massless Elementary Particles = Bodies of Mass?

[Mudhammam]

I found the following quote, if accurate, to be a profound and mysterious statement about the fabric of reality:

"Mass is constructed entirely from the energy of the interactions involving naturally massless elementary particles ... The physicists kept dividing, and in the end found nothing at all." - Jim Baggott

1) Who is Jim Baggott?
2) How do masslass elementary particles on one level of description = varying weights of material bodies on another? Is it simply that elementary particles (or wavicles) do contain a very infinitesimally small amount of mass, and depending on how they bind, amount to weight? Is this unknown, and simply stands as another apparent paradox that sits at the limits of perception and understanding?

[One Above All]

The Universe started out as pure energy. In a way, you could consider photons to be the elementary particle. On the other hand, if we consider things what they were instead of what they are, we're idiots.
EDIT: Sorry; I forgot to actually answer your questions.
1: No clue who he is. Never heard of him before.
2: Photons have no rest mass, but they do have inertia. Elementary particles do indeed have rest mass, even if it is small. Note that weight is not the same as mass, though weight does depend on mass, among other things.

[vorlon13]

They might have gone a little too far with the masslessness angle.

AFAIK, it is widely accepted that (in my words) around 40% of the 'heft' you notice it takes to lift something is due to energy.

It works like this:

inside the protons and neutrons are particles called quarks. They are constrained to zip around in extremely tiny spaces at extremely high velocities. Those high velocities represent energy (makes sense) and energy equals mass through Einsteins equation, energy equals mass times the velocity of light, squared. (a tiny bit of mass equals an enormous amount of energy).


So, the energy of motion of the quarks is equal to an additional amount of mass. And since the velocities are very high, the equivalent mass amounts to about 40% of what we note to be the mass of those particles.


A similar effect has been noted in the solar system (!!!). Mercury has an elliptical orbit (as opposed to circular) as it moves around our sun. The point of closest approach to the sun very slowly moves around the sun (with respect to the distant stars) as a result of the gravity of the other planets and asteroids in the solar system.

A careful study of all these effects reveals a mystery. That point moves around the sun slightly faster than the sum of all the forces acting upon it. This was noted over 150 years ago. Einstein was aware of the mystery, and realized the gravitational field of the sun represents and enormous amount of energy. That energy is equivalent to an additional amount of mass over and above what is apparent to us. And when the math is done (leave that to Einstein and the folks that do that for a living) Mercury is behaving EXACTLY the way the calculations describe it.

The suns gravity also affects the positions we appear to note for the stars we see near the sun during a total solar eclipse, but that is for another thread . . . .

[Anomalocaris]

I think he is referring to the higg's field, whose interaction with some particles gives those particles the attribute of mass.

He just phrased it in a totally misleading way.

[Mudhammam]

When you ponder that everything we perceive to be the Universe, the very possibility of experience depends on particles zipping around at "extremely high velocities" within atoms and molecules doing the same, in bodies cultivated on a planet swirling around a star at so many thousands of mph, a star that is itself swirling around a black hole at more than a million mph, and a black hole that exists in the centre of a space expanding at a speed that excels the speed of light. All because of a law of causality that is intuitive to our understanding, which is seemingly made possible by that very law of causality.

I don't it's incorrect to view the above as representative of a sort of clockwork.

[Anomalocaris]

That depends on what your notion of clockwork actually is. One could imagine an extremely complex clockwork that is ultimately deterministic but which on the surface appears to be random and the probabilistic. One could also imagine a genuinely probabilistic machine whose behavior on the surface is so close to deterministic as to make no difference to any users of the machine.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Who is Jim Baggott?

Baggott's a physicist (and quite a good one, I'm given to understand) who writes - and occasionally raves - against what he calls 'fairy tale physics'.

Basically, he objects to physicists popularizing wacky ideas - parallel universes, soap-bubble cosmology, etc - when, not only is there no experimentation on which to base these ideas, there isn't even any conceivable way to design such experiments.

Boru

[Alex K]

Dunno who the guy is. Anyways, I'd also suspect he refers to the fact that in the theory, all the other known elementary particles get their mass from the Higgs field (*). I don't get what the big deal is though, its not like massless particles are somehow less real such that it would warrant the statement that we divided and found nothing.

Mass is first of all the minimal energy cost you have to pay to make a particle. The theory is set up such that there should be no such cost involved in make a single isolated electron, say, but if you turn on the higgs field, making an electron in its presence requires a mimimal extra energy, the mass. The fact that it then propagates more slowly through space is a secondary effect it seems.

The Higgs itself and neutrinos are a mixed bag, for different reasons.