The Building Blocks of Matter

by Philip Mintz

All of the matter that we know about is built of the same building blocks. If two samples of matter are as different as gold and water, it is because of the number of blocks per atom is greater for one than for the other. However, all atoms consist of protons and electrons, and all except hydrogen have neutrons.

Each atom has protons and neutrons in its nucleus. Electrons surround the nucleus. In the event of a nuclear reaction, the product atom may have one proton less than the reactant atom. What makes this interesting is that the mass per proton is less for the product than for the reactant.

Since the reaction includes the escape of a proton, the blame for the loss of mass was placed on the proton. It was said that the proton escaped with a tremendous amount of kinetic energy. What was the source of the kinetic energy? It had to be the potential energy in the form of the force that repels each proton away from the other protons.

However, energy is not a thing in itself. It is an abstraction. The stuff that the proton is made of is doing the pushing. Furthermore, the mass that is taken from the remaining protons is transferred to the departing proton.

That is another problem because the reduction in mass of a proton does not entail any of the charge of the proton, which is constant and the same for all protons. All of this implies that the proton is composed of a core of positive charges surrounded by a cloud of negative and positive pairs of bits of charge. More than ninety percent of the mass of the proton is in that cloud, and that cloud is the source of the mass that is donated to the departing proton.

What we see here is that mass does not change into energy. Instead, the increase in motion of the proton is accompanied by an increase in mass, not a loss of mass. When the departing proton collides with something, it transfers both mass and motion to the thing it hits.

There is a kind of nuclear reaction that is due to the entrance of an electron into the nucleus. It sometimes comes flying out of the atom with a positron which it has removed from a neutron. The electron and the positron combine and form a gamma ray photon. A photon has length and frequency. The photon departs from the interacting electron and positron one pair of negative-positive bits at a time. Each pair is a half cycle. From cycle to cycle, the orientaion of the pair reverces.

The interesting part of this is that the frequency of one such photon can differ from another such photon by as little as one half cycle. That tells us how small the fundamental building blocks of matter are.

The funny part is that the photon has mass. The reason why a photon moves at the speed c is that its pairs are pushed by a strong repulsive force which accelerates them in a brief instant in which nothing can counteract the process.