To understand what actually happens when you violently attempt to rip a quark out of a proton, you have to look at Einstein's most famous equation:.Because the string tension of the gluon field remains constant as you pull two quarks apart, the amount of energy stored in the stretching flux tube builds up rapidly. Long before you can pull the quarks far enough apart to isolate one, the energy density within the tube becomes so immense that it reaches a cosmic breaking SEPARATION Instead of the string stretching infinitely, the energy abruptly snaps. Following the laws of mass-energy equivalence , the stored energy is instantly converted into mass, spontaneously generating a brand-new quark and antiquark pair at the break site.The new particles immediately bind with the separating quarks. Instead of ending up with one isolated quark, you simply end up with two new pairs (mesons), a process known in particle physics as hadronization....