I read that the vast majority of a proton’s mass is due to the strong force; the individual quarks comprising it provide only 1% of the mass.
How does this happen?
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Gravity/Mass is caused by compression of spacetime. The energy from the strong force compresses spacetime more than other things.
It isn’t the force but the energy that causes mass.
If you compress a spring and that spring now contains the potential energy that was used to compress that spring, the spring has more mass. Surprising as it may seem – a compressed spring has more mass than the same spring uncompressed although that difference will be so small as to be hard to measure unless it is a huge spring.
So energy whether potential or kinetic results in mass (the famous Einstein equation) That could be from gravity potential, kinetic energy due to motion etc. Not only the strong force.
Einstein showed that mass has energy, and energy has apparent mass (mass energy equivalence, or E = mc^(2)). They’re two sides of the same coin, proverbially speaking.
A system of quarks held together by the strong force have potential energy, just as an atomic nucleus held together by the strong force has potential energy: if you were to overcome the strong force, you would release the electromagnetic potential energy that wants to push those nucleons apart, just as if you were to overcome the static friction keeping a ball on top of a hill still to push it over the edge, you would release the gravitational potential energy contained in the ball-earth system.
That’s simplifying a lot, but the energy present in the quark system that comprises a composite particle like a proton bends spacetime and gives rise to apparent mass.
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