This book is a Weekend Pocketbook on Everything You Should Know About Where Mass Comes From, the story of one of the most fundamental questions in physics: why does anything have weight at all?
Written in everyday language, this book explores how the heaviness of the world leads us from the Big Bang to the Higgs field, from the heart of the proton to the ghostly world of neutrinos, and finally to the unseen mass that holds galaxies together.
What does a number on a weighing scale really measure?
We explore the Higgs field, the invisible presence thought to fill all of space. Why did the early universe need this field to "turn on"? Why do some particles pass through it almost untouched while others seem to acquire weight from it? And why did the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) answer one great question while opening many more?
Most of the mass in the things we touch does not come directly from things we can see. In physics, there is a strange possibility that much of ordinary matter's mass is really trapped energy in disguise.
This is a journey into the fascinating science of neutrino oscillations, the seesaw mechanism, Majorana particles, and underground experiments that reveal new clues about the origin of mass.
Finally, we confront the greatest missing piece: dark matter. If visible matter makes up only a small fraction of the universe's inventory, where does the rest of cosmic mass come from? Mass feels like the most ordinary thing in the world, but the more you think about it, the more you realize we know so little about it
