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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E=mc^2 is what you get if you convert mass directly to energy. Take hydrogen fusion in the sun. It takes 4 H to make 1 He. If you compare the mass of 4H versus 1 He, you’d see that there is a difference of ~0.7%. That is where the sun’s energy (or nuclear fission) come from.
In conventional physics, you do not change the mass. You can change the amount of kinetic or potential energy in an object. You can remove or add mass, but the mass still exist. For example, if you burn a piece of wood in a closed system, there would be no change in mass before and after. Some of the carbon is converted into CO2, but the actual mass of all the atoms is the same. The energy you get is purely from the potential energy in the chemical bonds.
E=mc^2 is actually taking the mass and converting it to energy (or vice versa). For almost all applications, you will be able to convert 0% of mass to energy, so this term is irrelevant. It’s only when you are dealing with fission or fusion does it start to matter.
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