I heard a fascinating story on NPR this morning, a story describing the “Large Hadron Collider” (an underground ring of superconducting magnets, designed to study subatomic particle collisions). This story happened to include a very interesting, albeit brief, description of mass. Mass has been well described in terms of its effects, but its difficult to find an adequate description of what mass actually is. In this story, mass is described as a property of a vacuum that forms a kind of “stickiness”, grabbing hold of all matter within the vacuum; this property is called the Higgs field.
This field, along with the Higgs boson (a massive scalar elementary particle), was predicted to exist back in 1964.
Its an interesting description, and I think I’ll see what else I can learn about it.