Terror of the Geeks

Updated "Why is there air?" Remember Bill Cosby asking that way back in the days when he actually worked at being funny instead of lazily expecting loud guffaws every time he made a face? Well, scientists have long had a similar but much harder question: Why is there mass?

You can say you have the mass you do because it's the sum total of the masses of all the fundamental particles making you up. But why do those particles have mass? And why do they have the masses they do?

If you think the question is weird, the answer may be weirder: It might involve quantum entanglement.

Quantum entanglement. One of the stranger aspects of quantum physics, it means that two fundamental particles can become "entangled" as the result of an interaction, with the result that later changing some aspect of one, say its "spin," instantly changes the same aspect of the other - no matter how far apart they are. What makes this particularly weird is that it means (and this has been experimentally confirmed) that the information about the change of one is transmitted to the other faster than the speed of light, which non-quantum physics says is impossible and which is the macro world, it is.

Last year physicist Vlatko Vedral of the University of Leeds, UK, showed that entanglement is involved in superconductivity.

Vedral says that the ability of a magnet to levitate above a superconductor can only be caused by a current composed of entangled electrons. They would serve to stop the photons of the magnetic field from penetrating more than a short distance into the superconductor, making them act as if they had mass.

Vedral also claims that a similar mechanism may be behind the mass of all particles. The standard model of physics says that matter is made of particles ... while the various forces in the universe ... act through "mediator" particles....

In theory, these mediators are all massless, and so all the fundamental forces should act over infinite distances. In reality, they do not: the forces have a limited range [which means] the mediator particles have mass.

This is thought to be due to what's called the Higgs field and mediated by the Higgs boson. The problem is, no one produced direct evidence of a Higgs boson and no one has explained how the field could affect mediator particles.

Entanglement could be the answer. Vedral has shown that the condensation of the Higgs bosons and exclusion of the mediators requires entanglement between the Higgs bosons. Entanglement may be linked to the mass of not just the mediator particles, but all fundamental particles. Different particles would interact differently with the entangled Higgs bosons, providing different "effective masses" for each particle.

The idea is sketchy, but other scientists think what Vedral admits is an intuition is worth studying.

And if all this is confusing or even seems bizarre, remember that it was Niels Bohr who said "If you're not outraged by quantum mechanics, you don't understand it." What it all means is that when Shakespeare had Hamlet say "There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy," he didn't know the half of it.

Updated to add some explanatory links. Although I'm not sure they'll make things a whole lot clearer.

Another thing occurred to me as I was doing this. "Entanglement" is sometimes described as two particles acting as if they were in some way one particle. If in fact the Higgs field permeates the universe and if in fact it is composed of entangled bosons which then act, in effect, as one, doesn't that bring us around the long way back to something akin to the aether?