Tried watching a few videos and reading articles, dumbed down even for me, still can’t get my head around it.
Let’s assume it is a 1 kg lead weight in the vacuum of space floating at 1mph.
if its floating through space then apart from kinetic energy which sent it there, and the gravitational energy which made it, what energy is there in that object which makes it applicable to the equation. “A small amount of mass is equal to a large amount of energy” but how?
Also, why is it the speed of light squared? Surely it’d just be the speed of light. If squared that’d be a massive speed so why is it used here?
Finally how come it’s so important? Why is it still important today? Don’t want to sound reductionist but this really makes no sense to me to why it’s so famous.
There are plenty of explanations, none of which make this equation make sense. So assume I am actually 5 years old and somehow figured out how to make a reddit post, how would you explain it?
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Because of a lot of math. Its super famous and about that much misunderstood. There is no Eli5 version to fully explain how we get these results.
What it means is that Energy, mass and momentum are related. But still we would need to have a formal definition of what mass is. Otherwise E=mc² is a nothing burger.
Some some time ago asked about how light has energy while no mass. The answer is similar to what would probably give you insight to what the world’s most famous equation is about and how do we get there so might be helpful. (However its a bit beyond the realm of Eli5 but some things are just not that simple.)
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