Courtesy of Yahoo! News:

It’s taken more than a century, but Einstein’s celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.

A brainpower consortium led by Laurent Lellouch of France’s Centre for Theoretical Physics, using some of the world’s mightiest supercomputers, have set down the calculations for estimating the mass of protons and neutrons, the particles at the nucleus of atoms.

According to the conventional model of particle physics, protons and neutrons comprise smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are bound by gluons.

The odd thing is this: the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks is only five percent. Where, therefore, is the missing 95 percent?

Read the rest here.

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This one will exercise your brain, courtesy of Astronomy Buff:

The Big Bang was not an explosion of matter into space, rather it was an explosion of space ITSELF, and since space and time are interconnected, we really have to say it was an explosion of space AND time, or space-time.

So, the Big Bang wasn’t an explosion of stuff like atoms or molecules, it was an explosion of a place and instance, it was the creation of when and where.

Before the Big Bang there was simply nothing, there was no ‘where’ nor was there a ‘when’. It doesn’t even make sense to say ‘before the Big Bang’.

Read the very interesting post here. And then read it again, and again.

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