Apologies if the tittle sounds confusing.
Let’s say you have two eggs, each containing a volume of 15 mL. When you smash two eggs together in a bowl, in theory you would have 30 mL worth of volume.
Could this be the same for atoms when they collide in a nuclear reactor? (The volume of egg would be substituted by a magnitude of energy, let’s say 20 J.)
Edit: Can’t believe my ass just confuse between nuclear fusion and fission 💀. Sorry for the confusion and thank you for the answers!
In: 2
In your egg example, mass is conserved (the initial mass of the two eggs equals the mass of the smashed eggs).
In nuclear fusion, the mass is not conserved. Some of that mass is converted to energy. From Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence, E = mc^2 where c is the speed of light, we can see that a lot of energy comes from a little bit of mass. That is what makes nuclear fusion so desirable.
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