What keeps mass from turning into energy that we can use?
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There are several things in our universe that are conserved. These are quantum numbers.
So long as these things do not change, mass *can* become energy, but it’s hard to turn mass into energy without these changing.
For instance, take a proton. It has some mass, but if it became energy (like a photon) it would lose its charge. This is not allowed, so until it can combine with an electron this proton cannot become energy.
Combining a proton with an electron has its own issues – I was just giving an example. Even when a proton *does* combine with an electron it forms a neutron and only releases a bit of energy.
We do that all the time. That’s how fossil fuels work, and nuclear power. As long as you have a means to convert potential energy to a usable form such as heat (burning fossil fuels, nuclear fission), you can convert some of that mass into energy.
We cannot use the energy produced from ‘rest mass’ to generate. Because such energy has extremely high frequency/energy that can destroy microstructure like DNA.
The energy that actually corresponds to something with which we can generate is kinetic energy of nuclei, aka heat. The kinetic energy comes from binding energy within unstable nucleus, and of course once unstable nucleus decays and finally ends up with stable particles, there’s a rest mass difference, which turned into energy.
So your question, in a more fundamental level, is that what keeps some particles stable or unstable.
The answer to that: nobody knows, even to this today. What we know is that there is a special kind of force/interaction that causes a nucleus to decay to other ‘smaller’ particles. It’s called ‘weak interaction’. And that ‘strong interaction’ is what keeps nucleus intact (at least until it decays).
And we also know that strong interaction is like electromagnetism, but has 3 charges (called colors, red green blue), gets weaker at high energy (asymptotic freedom), and always have 0 net-color-charge (color confinement).
Weak interaction is trickier, because initially it required almost separate theory that was inconsistent with electromagnetism and strong interaction. But it turns out that if you add something that gives mass into the theory,, it actually has connection with electromagnetism (for this reason it’s now called electroweak interaction).
Technically, in line with E=mc², energy input is required to convert mass to energy. The amount of energy required is typically very large. It takes energy to push mass back into energy form, whereas energy essentially “decays” into a lower state which can form mass. IIRC. It’s late. Lol
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