Physicists have finally calculated where the mass of the proton comes from by Nathan Byrne Hewitt, Debden Park High School

The mass of a proton is more than just the sum of its quarks. And now physicists have discovered what accounts for the subatomic particles heft.

Quarks are the even smaller particles that protons are made of, so you would expect that simply adding the quarks masses would give you the protons mass. However the sum of the quarks masses is too small to explain the protons bulk. New calculations show that only 9 percent of the protons heft comes from the quarks it’s made of and rest comes from the complicated effects that occur inside the particle.

Most of the proton’s 938 million electron volts of mass is due to quantum chromodynamics, the theory which accounts for the spinning of particles within the proton. 

So 9 percent of the proton’s mass comes from it’s constitute quarks, 32 percent comes from the energy of the quarks zipping around inside the proton, (That’s because energy and mass (matter) are interchangeable; they are different forms of the same thing due to Einstein’s equation, E=mc2.) 

Massless particles called gluons, that help hold quarks together, make up 36 percent via their energy.

The remaining 23 percent is due to quantum effects that occur when quarks and gluons interact in complicated ways within the proton.