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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> How come it’s so important?
If a nuclear bomb is going to convert 1000g of plutonium into 999g of uranium, you can figure out the energy released in the explosion using E = mc^2.
If you are going to use a nuclear reactor to power a spacecraft or a submarine, you need to know how much fuel you’ll need to move as far as you want to go.
> Why is it the speed of light squared?
A speed times a mass is an amount of momentum, not energy. Obviously, momentum can be converted to energy in a lot of ways, like when water turns a waterwheel or wind turns a windmill. But it’s not inherently an amount of energy in itself–a bullet and a baseball can have the same momentum but wildly different energies.
> Don’t want to sound reductionist but this really makes no sense to me to why it’s so famous.
Part of why it’s so famous is that it’s so unexpected that energy, mass, and light would have some kind of intrinsic connection between them. And not only are they connected, but they have this incredibly simple equation without any frills.
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