From macroscopic scales down to subatomic ones, the sizes of the fundamental particles play only a small role in determining the sizes of composite structures. For protons, the quarks barely play a role at all in determining its mass. (MAGDALENA KOWALSKA / CERN / ISOLDE TEAM)

At Last, Physicists Understand Where Matter’s Mass Comes From

The answer has nothing at all to do with the Higgs boson.

In this Universe, there are very few fundamental properties that cannot be derived from something simpler. The rules governing biological systems are rooted in chemical interactions, bonds, and applied voltages. The rules of chemistry can be derived from more fundamental physical laws that govern all particles. And if you strip down the components of any physical system, you’ll eventually arrive at the simplest descriptions of reality we know of: the particles and interactions that make up all of our known reality. While all the particles that exist have their own specific, unique properties, there are only a few that define them, such as mass, electric charge, color charge, and weak hypercharge. Yet why the particles have the properties they do is not fully understood; the values of the fundamental constants behind the Universe cannot be derived from anything presently known.

The values of the fundamental constants, as they were known in 1998, and published in the Particle Data Group’s 1998 booklet. (PDG, 1998, BASED ON E.R. COHEN AND B.N. TAYLOR, REV. MOD. PHYS. 59, 1121 (1987))

For thousands of years, humanity has searched for the smallest, most fundamental building blocks of nature. Since ancient times, we conjectured that there would be some smallest…