I always though of energy as motion – heat is atoms vibrating and moving, sound is a wave of atoms pushing each other in a specific direction, electricity is the movement of electrons, etc. But I’ve heard that e=mc^2 means energy can become matter and matter can be energy. How can motion become physical matter?
In: Physics
Einstein’s theory of relativity itself doesn’t say that energy can become matter. It says that mass is just another form of energy, i.e. a motionless object with no potential energy still has energy in the form of its mass, through the famous E = mc^(2).
What you need to do if you want to describe ‘creating’ matter is use something called a quantum field theory. In this theory, subatomic particles can create other subatomic particles, but energy has to be conserved. Part of the energy available to create new particles is the mass-energy of the initial particles. The other energy available is mostly kinetic energy.
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