Up-to-date with the Big Bang, Mass, and Protons

Not all that much to do with Hank’s recent blog about the Galileo document that isn’t, but a note about how Einstein could be somewhat “pig-headed”, similar misunderstandings and new developments in contemporary fundamental physics.

Not all that much to do with Hank’s recent blog about the Galileo document that isn’t, but a note about how Einstein could be somewhat “pig-headed”, similar misunderstandings and new developments in contemporary fundamental physics.

Anton Petrov has been doing a bit of debunking lately. Recently, people have been spreading the idea that the James Web Space Telescope has somehow “disproved” the Big Bang Theory. This was kicked off by the title of recent paper [2207.09428] Panic! At the Disks: First Rest-frame Optical Observations of Galaxy Structure at $z > 3$ with JWST in the SMACS 0723 Field, with not everybody getting the reference to the project Panic! at the Disco.

Another recent video along the same lines is the idea that the Higgs boson is responsible for the mass of all the ordinary matter in the universe. It transpires that only roughly 1% of this mass is attributable to the Higgs, which operates via the weak interaction. The mass of protons and neutrons is much greater than that of their constituent quarks. I understood from Wikipedia that the main part comes from the kinetic energy of the three constituent quarks inside the baryon, but from the video I learn that it comes from the gluons which mediate the strong interaction.

Oh, and one more thing (as Columbo would say):

People are finding what appears to be Evidence for intrinsic charm quarks in the proton (Nature). Curiouser and curioser, as Alice said in Wonderland.