4 HN users recommended this explainer4 months2015–2023score 4.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
Recommended as a clear explanation of where mass actually comes from.
Veritasium explains that the Higgs boson accounts for only a small fraction of everyday mass. Most of a proton's mass comes from the energy of the gluon field binding its quarks.
“This video explains where the mass of a proton comes from” (HN, 2020)
Veritasium had a video explaining this a few years back, it's one of the videos responsible for sparking my interest in physics and cosmology. [this video]
Explains where mass comes from; sparked physics interest.
This video explains where the mass of a proton comes from: [this video] Based on your comments above, though, I don't think watching this would change your opinion about anything. People have been more than polite in trying to help you fix your misunderstandings, but you refuse to absorb any new information or change your views when presented with new data.
This video might help understand where mass comes from and how to potentially modulate it, because mass can be thought of as bound energy creating voids in the gluon field: [this video] The Higgs mechanism affects electrons, not quarks, and is only responsible for about 1% of matter's mass. Most mass comes from the binding energy between quarks, which creates flux tubes between quark-antiquark pairs. If we add more energy to pull quarks apart, eventually the total energy added exceeds the mass-energy equivalence of another quark-antiquark pair, so a new pair gets created from the vacuum. I believe this is related to the Casimir effect, but IANAP (physicist). Keep in mind that the mass-energy equivalence also applies to time. So like in the movie Interstellar, when they go down to the water planet, gravity is so high that time passes slower for them than the guy in the orbiting ship. In other words, the ship sees the landing craft move slower and slower as it approaches the surface. This difference in the speed of time near a gravity well is what slows the inner edge of a satellite slightly more than the outer, curving it along the path of the orbit, which from the satellite's perspective feels like a straight line at that velocity, because it's weightless and feels no other acceleration other than tidal force. So if someone could move large amounts of energy into a confined space with some kind of flux capacitor (is this a pun? I don't even know anymore), they could slow time ther
Explains mass as binding energy rather than Higgs.
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
4 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Read more