Tales of the Quantum: Understanding Physics' Most Fundamental Theory

by Art Hobson

Imagine two protons smashing into each other as they do within the Large Hadron Collider, in slow motion, and at far higher energies than is possible at the Collider. We’ve seen that gravity is negligible at distances such as 0.1 nm (the distance across a hydrogen atom). But as our two protons get closer and closer, the forces between them increase, so the energy stored in their force fields increases. But energy has mass, so the masses of the protons increase as they get closer. This mass increase affects the gravitational force but not the EM force, causing gravitational attraction to increase enormously faster than the other forces as the protons get closer. Eventually, gravitational attraction exceeds all the repulsive forces, and the situation becomes unstable. Beyond this point, the distance between the protons continues to decrease spontaneously as their masses increase toward infinity. There must be something wrong with this picture, because an infinite mass would cause the entire universe to collapse!