Photons have no resting mass, but my understanding that they still distort spacetime. It's not only mass that generates gravity. We're talking about weight, and it's mass-eneregy that warps spacetime/generates gravity.[0]
My understanding is that none of the virtual interactions in the Feynman path integral for that photon traveling through spacetime (such as spontaneously becoming a particle-antiparticle pair) affect the far-field gravitational field generated by the photon.
Also, 99% of the mass of your body is not electrons and quarks, but the binding energy between quarks. The mass of a proton is ~938 MeV/C^2, but the masses of its quarks sum to about 9 MeV/C^2. The rest of the proton's mass is the binding energy of the quarks. You get a similar ratio for the neutron. The electron's resting mass is roughly 0.5 MeV/C^2.
I think the Higgs mechanism is responsible for the rest mass of quarks, leptons, and neutrinos, but the majority of mass in atoms is due to nuclear binding energy, not the Higgs mechanism.
Though, my formal physics education didn't go beyond Freshman year E&M, so I could be way off.
Photons have no resting mass, but my understanding that they still distort spacetime. It's not only mass that generates gravity. We're talking about weight, and it's mass-eneregy that warps spacetime/generates gravity.[0]
My understanding is that none of the virtual interactions in the Feynman path integral for that photon traveling through spacetime (such as spontaneously becoming a particle-antiparticle pair) affect the far-field gravitational field generated by the photon.
Also, 99% of the mass of your body is not electrons and quarks, but the binding energy between quarks. The mass of a proton is ~938 MeV/C^2, but the masses of its quarks sum to about 9 MeV/C^2. The rest of the proton's mass is the binding energy of the quarks. You get a similar ratio for the neutron. The electron's resting mass is roughly 0.5 MeV/C^2.
I think the Higgs mechanism is responsible for the rest mass of quarks, leptons, and neutrinos, but the majority of mass in atoms is due to nuclear binding energy, not the Higgs mechanism.
Though, my formal physics education didn't go beyond Freshman year E&M, so I could be way off.
[0] https://van.physics.illinois.edu/QA/listing.php?id=28195