The structure of the nucleon is of fundamental interest. Almost all the non-dark-matter mass in the Universe is contained within the nucleon. The nucleon is unique among systems of ordinary matter in that most of its mass is not due to the masses of its constituents. For example, QCD calculations of nucleon mass propose that most of the nucleon's mass is due to the energy in the gluon fields. Such strong gluon fields are expected to give rise to significant numbers of virtual quark and antiquark pairs. Indeed, the importance of this sea of qq pairs has been demonstrated in the analysis of vN scattering. Since the nucleon contains no net strangeness, any effect of strange quarks on the structure of the nucleon should be attributable to the strange-quark sea. Hints of the importance of the strange quark sea to the mass of the nucleon or to the spin structure of the nucleon raise the question of whether static properties of the nucleon ground state, such as the electromagnetic form factors, also depend on the strength of the strange-quark sea.
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