Gluons carry a color charge so they actually attract each other and stick together, so you can theoretically strip away all the physical matter to leave just a knot of pure force behind which physicists call a glueball. People predicted these things back in the seventies but the math was brutally difficult to solve back then, then supercomputers finally calculated exactly what this particle should look like a couple of decades ago. A massive machine in Beijing then smashed electrons and positrons together for years to produce enough energy to catch one, and scientists dug through all the data to find a very specific energy spike that would be a marker of a glueball.

Once it was found, the next step was to prove that this thing was actually pure force. This was done by calculating the spin and quantum properties of the mystery particle to see how they compared to the models. The numbers matched perfectly and the signal was so strong that it couldn’t be dismissed as a random fluke, but the team still faced a massive challenge to prove the particle contained absolutely no regular matter. Regular particles contain quarks that break apart into very recognizable pieces, but a glueball’s mathematically forbidden from breaking down into those specific combinations. The researchers focused entirely on finding those forbidden fragments by analyzing a decade worth of data from the collider to look for normal matter signatures or unexpected reactions with light. And since they found absolutely nothing, that meant that the particle left no normal debris behind because they contained no physical matter.

We now know that pure force can ball up and exist as a physical entity on its own. You’ve probably heard about the Higgs particle giving things mass, but that only accounts for a tiny fraction of an atom’s weight. The chaotic energy of these bizarre gluons is what generates the other 99% of the mass in the entire universe. The physicists pinned down a real glueball and fully validated the exact mechanism that gives mass to everything around us.