albert einstein the meaning of relativity

But if you smash them together with enough energy, you'll get a photon, and electron, and a new matter-antimatter pair of particles out. If you take a photon and and electron and smash them together, you get a photon and an electron out. If you take two billiard balls and smash them together, you get two billiard balls out. are broken up into their components and scattered, but new particles are also created from the available energy in the collision.Įnergy can be used to make mass out of nothing. The particle tracks emanating from a high energy collision at the LHC in 2014.

The amount of mass you destroy becomes energy, and the amount of energy you get is given by E = mc 2. But the amount of the difference is how much energy is released! That's true for everything from decaying uranium to fission bombs to nuclear fusion in the Sun to matter-antimatter annihilation. When we experience a radioactive decay, or a nuclear fission or fusion reaction, the mass of what we started with is greater than the mass we wind up with the law of conservation of mass is invalid. For every 1 kilogram of mass you turn into energy, you get 9 × 10 16 joules of energy out, which is the equivalent of 21 Megatons of TNT. This is the second meaning of the equation, where E = mc 2 tells us exactly how much energy you get from converting mass. This creation-and-annihilation process, which obeys E = mc^2, is the only known way to create and destroy matter or antimatter. reaction (right), with matter/antimatter annihilating back to pure energy. The production of matter/antimatter pairs (left) from pure energy is a completely reversible.

Albert einstein the meaning of relativity