• Question: what gives something its mass?

    Asked by batman to Tom, Matt, Hugh, Douglas, Antonia on 24 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Matthew Hurley

      Matthew Hurley answered on 13 Jun 2010:

      OK – everything is made up elements – carbon, hydrogen etc. Each of these elements are different sizes as they contain different amounts of electrons, neutrons and protons. The more stuff inside each atom – the greater it’s mass. So if you know what elements something contains (and how many) you can work out it’s mass.

    • Photo: Douglas Blane

      Douglas Blane answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      Simple question, but one of the hardest to answer in all science.

      Best guess at the moment is it’s something called the Higgs Boson – which gets its name from a physicist who worked at Edinburgh University – Peter Higgs.

      We don’t actually know if the Higgs boson exists. So far it’s just a theory and no one has detected it.

      One of the main jobs of the Large Hadron Collider is to try to detect a Higgs.

      Bit more about the Large Hadron Collider and the Higgs here: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/lhc/WhyLHC-en.html.

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