eli5: Why was E=mc2 so revolutionary?
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It was revolutionary in multiple ways. Probably the biggest was that it provides the relationship between mass and energy, implying that the two are different aspects of the same thing. This led to things like atomic energy and nuclear bombs. It’s also a pretty fundamental understanding of how our universe works.
It also led to the understanding that things we typically think of as immutable such as the flow of time, the dimensions and mass of objects, are in fact not just one thing. They can be different depending on things like relative motion. This is contrary to pretty much all of physics before it, where it is assumed that there is a single objective reality.
One of the things that was so amazing about it was that Einstein basically took the measured fact that the speed of light (in a vacuum) is a constant and deduced the rest.
Run that one by again: The constant speed of light led to understanding that matter = energy. That’s genius.
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