Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Empty space full of mass!

In his current column in American Scientist, Brian Hayes points out that the
three quarks inside a proton account for only about 1 percent of the proton's measured mass; all the rest of the mass comes from the energy that binds the quarks together. We already knew that atoms are mostly empty space; now we learn that the nuclei inside atoms are mere puffballs, with almost no solid substance.

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