Baryons and the Borromeo

The kernels in the tangible matter of our everyday experience are composed of light quarks. At least, they are light classically; but they don't remain light. Dynamical effects within the Standard Model of Particle Physics change them in remarkable ways, so that in some configurations they appear nearly massless, but in others possess masses on the scale of light nuclei. Modern experiment and theory are exposing the mechanisms responsible for these remarkable transformations. The rewards are great if we can combine the emerging sketches into an accurate picture of confinement, which is such a singular feature of the Standard Model; and looming larger amongst the emerging ideas is a perspective that leads to a Borromean picture of the proton and its excited states.