The Most Cited But Least Understood Equation
If you were to stop people on the street and ask them to name a famous equation, I suspect the most common answer you’d hear is Einstein’s Energy/Mass equation: E=mc2 But as a follow up, I pretty much guarantee the majority of folks who will give you that answer won’t be able to explain what it means. Do you know? What is the meaning of arguably one of the most important and elegant equations in physics?
The equation itself is quite simple: Energy (E) equals Mass (m) times the Speed of Light squared (c – a really, really big number). What Einstein realized is that matter and energy are deeply intertwined and that you could convert one to the other and back again. What the equation tells us numerically is that it only takes a little tiny bit of mass to generate huge amounts of energy as we see in atomic bombs. Of course, atomic bombs aren’t exactly pure conversions of energy; for that you have to look at antimatter. When matter, the stuff we see around us is made of, comes in contact with antimatter the two annihilate each other into a 100% conversion to energy, releasing those big numbers you get when you multiply even the tiniest amount of mass with the speed of light squared. So yes, your keyboard is a potential nuclear bomb of a truly frightening scale. But at the same time, understand that this is essentially what is happening deep in the core of the Sun, fusing hydrogen into helium and releasing energy in the process (and losing a tiny bit of mass because of that energy release). That warmth you feel at the beach is the thermal radiation from the Sun’s conversion of mass to energy. Not all bad, right?
So when you think of Einstein’s famous equation or someone asks you about it (hey, it happens to me sometimes), just remember that you are made of matter and because of that you have tremendous amounts of energy stored within and that simple equation tells us how much.
For more on this, check out Ethan Siegel’s new article in Seed Magazine…
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/because_emc2/