Toronto Star

Just to demonstrate that I know virtually nothing about quantum physics, I have a wierd sort of confused way of smashing together cosmology and quantum physics:

If quarks have a mass of 180 Giga-electron-volts, and a proton has a mass of 1 GeV, and it takes 3 quarks to make a proton, then a proton has just 1 percent of the mass of the three quarks that make it up. So 99 percent of the mass was just radiated away, dispersed as "bond energy" in the form of a gamma ray.

If the total energy in the universe is finite, then there must be relatively fewer heavy particles compared to light particles --- many more protons than there are quarks. This is only possible if each quark contributes equally to the mass, charge and spin of many protons. So my screwed up understanding of physics is screaming at me how this could be possible for a quark to deposit the same amount of charge into 100 protons when the bond energy from one proton-forming event is just a gamma ray with no charge? Gaaah!