Yes — that's essentially the modern picture, though with a few subtleties.
When people first learn about mass, it is natural to imagine that the mass of a proton comes from adding up the masses of its three quarks. The surprise is that if you do that, you get only a small fraction of the proton's actual mass.
A proton has a mass of about 938 MeV/c². The masses of its three valence quarks contribute only a few MeV/c² each. Altogether they account for roughly 1% of the proton's mass.
So where does the other 99% come from?
The answer is the energy stored inside the proton. According to Einstein, energy contributes to inertia and gravitation just as rest mass does. Inside a proton there is an extraordinarily intense, confined dance of quarks and gluons. The quarks are moving relativistically, gluons are carrying momentum and energy, and the gluon field itself stores energy. All of that energy contributes to the proton's mass through E = mc².
One thing that is slightly misleading in some popular presentations is the statement that the mass comes from "kinetic energy" alone. It is more accurate to say it comes from the total energy of the bound system:
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The kinetic energy of the quarks.
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The energy in the gluon fields.
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The energy associated with the strong interaction itself.
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Various quantum effects involving "sea quarks" that continually appear and disappear.
In fact, the proton is so thoroughly a quantum object that trying to separate these cleanly is difficult. The mass emerges from the whole system.
An analogy I sometimes like is a compressed spring scale. If you weigh a box containing a compressed spring, it weighs slightly more than the same box with the spring relaxed, because the stored energy contributes to the mass. The proton is similar in principle, though vastly more complicated and governed by quantum chromodynamics (QCD).
The really astonishing part is that what we think of as the "solid stuff" of the world—rocks, trees, cats, people, planets—is mostly made of protons and neutrons. So most of the mass of ordinary matter is not the intrinsic mass of elementary particles. It is energy trapped in stable patterns by the strong force.
In a sense, when you put your hand on a table, almost all of the mass you are feeling is not "matter stuff" in the old classical sense. It is energy confined within nucleons and appearing to us as mass.
This is one of those places where Einstein's equation ceases to be a slogan and becomes a literal description of reality: the mass of everyday objects is largely frozen energy.
That example is fascinating because it points toward something broader than visual imagery.
When you're searching for place names ending in a particular sound, you're not consciously scanning a map in the ordinary sense. Yet your mind seems to be traversing some organized structure of geographic knowledge. You start with a region—say a state or country—and mentally check locations. Then, unexpectedly, "Lee's Summit" pops into awareness even though it wasn't part of the region you were consciously examining.
That sounds very much like what psychologists would call associative retrieval. The conscious mind is following one path, while a great deal of processing is occurring outside awareness. Then a candidate suddenly surfaces.
The experience is familiar in many domains. A person struggles to remember a name, gives up, and ten minutes later it appears. A mathematician works on a problem, takes a walk, and the solution arrives. The mind seems to continue searching even when attention has moved elsewhere.
What's interesting in your case is that the search space appears to be highly structured. You're not randomly generating words. You're searching a mental database of places, organized geographically and linguistically.
The fact that you describe "looking at a given state or country" is particularly telling. You immediately added that "a map in my head" isn't really right. So perhaps what you're doing is not looking at a picture but traversing a relational network:
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Kansas City connects to Missouri.
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Missouri connects to various towns.
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Lee's Summit is one of those towns.
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The final sound matches the criterion.
None of that requires a visual image. Yet it can still feel spatially organized.
One of the things cognitive scientists have discovered is that a lot of human knowledge is neither purely verbal nor purely visual. There are intermediate forms—spatial, relational, conceptual, procedural. Your mental geography may live largely in that territory.
The sudden appearance of Lee's Summit is also a reminder that consciousness sees only the final product, not the search process. You experience:
I'm checking places in Texas...
I'm checking places in Oklahoma...
...and suddenly Lee's Summit appears.
What you don't experience is whatever unconscious process connected those dots.
That may be why the "I just know" description keeps recurring in your accounts. Whether it's directions, constellations, names, or geography, the conscious experience often isn't one of inspecting a picture. It's one of receiving the result of a computation whose workings remain mostly hidden.
In a way, that is not unlike what happens when you talk. You don't consciously search through every word in English. The appropriate word simply arrives. The difference is that with your geography game you're watching the retrieval process closely enough to notice these sudden arrivals from outside the current line of thought.
Lee's Summit may have been sitting in the background all along, activated by the sound pattern and geographic associations, waiting until it crossed whatever threshold was needed to enter awareness. The surprise is not that it was found; the surprise is that you got to witness the moment it surfaced.
There is a lot of truth in that.
A picture is almost always a trade-off. It helps you grasp one aspect of a thing by quietly distorting others.
The Rutherford atom is a perfect example. The image of electrons orbiting a nucleus like planets around the Sun is wonderfully memorable. It conveys centrality, structure, and scale. It is also profoundly wrong if taken literally.
Likewise, popular depictions of protons as three colored balls connected by springs are useful teaching devices, but they are not what quantum chromodynamics describes. The actual mathematical object is far stranger than the picture.
So there is a sense in which vivid imagery can become a trap. Once you have a compelling picture, it is hard not to believe it.
On the other hand, I wouldn't go quite so far as to say it's best not to have the ability. Many physicists who are strong visualizers seem to use imagery as a provisional tool. The trick is that they learn to distrust it. They carry the picture lightly.
Perhaps the real skill is not the absence of imagery but the ability to remember that the image is a model rather than a photograph.
What strikes me, though, is that your way of thinking may naturally push you in that direction. If your internal representations are more relational than pictorial, you may be less tempted to ask, "What does a proton look like?" and more inclined to ask, "How do the parts relate?" or "What does the theory say it does?"
That is often closer to how modern physics actually proceeds.
There is an old story—perhaps apocryphal—about a student asking what an electron really looks like. The physicist replies, "You're assuming it looks like something."
That assumption comes very naturally to creatures who navigate the world with vision. We expect understanding to culminate in a picture. But physics has repeatedly encountered entities that are better characterized by their properties, relationships, symmetries, and behavior than by any visual appearance.
In that sense, your comment connects back to your earlier aphorism: making sense is not necessary.
A related one might be:
"A good picture helps. A true picture may not exist."
Or perhaps:
"The map is useful because it is wrong in a controlled way."
Every diagram of a proton, atom, galaxy, or even the Solar System leaves out most of reality. The art is knowing what has been left out.
Exactly. Every representation sacrifices something.
The Solar System is a wonderful example because the distortion is so extreme. If you draw the planets large enough to see, the distances are absurdly compressed. If you draw the distances to scale, the planets become nearly invisible specks. There is no static image on a page that can honestly represent both.
The Earth map problem is even deeper. There is a theorem in mathematics that you cannot flatten a sphere onto a plane without distortion. You get to choose what to preserve:
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Shape
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Area
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Distance
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Direction
You can preserve some well, but not all simultaneously.
The familiar Mercator projection preserves local shape and direction reasonably well, which made it useful for navigation, but it greatly enlarges high-latitude regions. Greenland looks enormous. Russia looks gigantic. Africa looks much smaller than it really is.
The startling fact is that Africa's area is about 30 million square kilometers, while Russia's is about 17 million. Africa is vastly larger, yet many maps suggest the opposite.
What strikes me is that this is really the same issue we've been discussing with protons and atoms.
A map is not wrong because it distorts. A map is wrong because it must distort. The question is which distortions are useful for the purpose at hand.
Likewise:
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The Rutherford atom distorts quantum mechanics.
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The Bohr atom distorts quantum mechanics.
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The little colored-ball proton distorts quantum chromodynamics.
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The rubber-sheet picture distorts general relativity.
Yet each can be useful if you know what it is preserving and what it is sacrificing.
In that sense, perhaps your skepticism about mental pictures is well founded. The picture is never the thing itself. It is a projection from a richer reality into a form a human mind can handle.
A globe is more faithful than a flat map, but even a globe leaves things out. It has no weather, no cities, no history, no cultures, no movement of tectonic plates. It is still a model.
The more we learn about the universe, the more it seems that understanding consists not of finding the correct picture but of knowing which picture is useful for which question—and remembering that every picture is a projection of something richer than the picture can contain.
That may be why your phrase "I just know" is intriguing. It suggests that in some domains your mind may store relationships directly, without first converting them into a picture. In a strange way, that might be closer to how the underlying mathematics works: relationships first, imagery second.
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