Nature of Energy

What if you could turn anything in the world into pure energy? What if that piece of paper you wrote on, your cup of coffee, or the computer that you’re using could just disappear into thin air, releasing all of the energy contained within them? Then, you would be able to release untold amounts of energy. One gram would correspond to 25 000 000 kWh of energy. Why? Einstein’s most famous equation shows that energy and mass are really one and the same.

The amount of energy, E, that a given mass is equivalent to is the mass, m, times the speed of light, c, squared. The speed of light is around 300 000 000 m/s, so a small amount of mass is really a large amount of energy in storage.

But mass can only be changed into energy and vice versa under certain conditions. If you throw a ball at 1 m/s at a wall, some of the kinetic energy of the ball is converted into the sound of the bounce. If you could “throw” a particle at the speed of light into a wall, it would have a lot more kinetic energy. At these very high energy levels, energy can be transformed into mass. Thus, on collision, mass would be created from the collision energy.

Natural “cookie cutters” exist for energy, the most common being the proton, electron, and neutron. These particles are created from precise amounts of energy, giving them their mass, charge, and overall behaviour. However, lone protons, electrons and neutrons cannot be created. Imagine energy is like a sheet of dough, and the particle as the cookie made by a cookie cutter. One other thing must be produced: a piece of dough with a particle-sized hole: an anti-cookie. Thus, both matter and anti-matter are simultaneously created from energy.

Continue to matter and antimatter and their long history with each other.