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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For the moment, ignore the c^2 term. Let’s look at the rest –
The main takeaway from this equation is that Energy and Mass are somehow equivalent. The c^2 is just a conversion factor showing how much mass is needed to get an unit of energy.
A very poor analogy would be that of a gas being condensed into a solid or a gas into a liquid. A large volume of gas can be condensed into a very small solid piece. Mass and energy are somewhat similar. A small amount of mass (read solid) and a large amount of energy (read gas) are basically the same thing.
What form they are in, depends on the environment and the physical constraints on the system. At low temperatures matter would prefer to be a solid/liquid. At higher temperatures, it might prefer to be a gas. Similarly, at low speeds, matter might be perceivable to us as a tangible mass, but at higher speeds, it might be perceivable to us as energy.
As for the c^2, it is just a number. As it turns out, there is a conversion factor involved i.e., a unit of mass is equivalent to ‘k’ units of energy. It just so happens that this conversion factor is a number that is the square of the maximum possible speed in vacuum ( which also happens to be the speed at which light travels in a vacuum).
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