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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Matter and energy are actually the same thing at a fundamental level. You can think of matter kind of like crystallized or ‘frozen’ energy. It takes a ridiculous amount of energy to fuse particles like protons and neutrons together in order to form matter. So, if you break those bonds apart, you will have that energy released.
Matter and energy can never be created or destroyed, only converted.
The formula is just giving us a mathematical framework of exactly one relates to the other. How much energy you can find per unit of mass or vice versa. It doesn’t really have anything to do with actually traveling at the speed of light. (Which should instead be called the speed of causality, but I digress…)
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