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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We can’t say “the lead weight is floating at 1mph”. Floating relative to what? Maybe the lead weight is stationary at the center of the universe and everything else is moving.
OK, what if the lead block happens to crash into another lead block made out of anti-matter? Kablooey. All mass is converted into energy at once. The formula tells how much energy you get. The squared term is needed so the units come out correctly.
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