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
Let’s not call it “energy” for a moment. Let’s call it That Which Is Conserved (ThWIC)
When they say “energy is the ability to do work”, they’re saying ThWIC is, well, conserved when converted into work – that is, the most friendly expenditure of energy, newtons-times-meters, indeed, your “motion”.
For you see, of all the sources they’ve found for ThWIC to be converted into your motion, they have never ever been able to cheat, and cause motion to beget other forms of ThWIC which could be harvested into motion again *without loss*. Yes, even if the sun’s rays on the panel seem to constitute a gain for us, a more complete equation featuring the sun as input does register a net loss, and God’s most complete algebra would register no loss at all, but mere rearrangement. The total of totals, which is: it’s conserved.
And matter is just energy condensed into a slow vibration. The one direction easily perceived as matter-antimatter’s annihilation into a more radiant energy. The other: if a particle accelerator’s only slightly subluminal slam of two itty bitty particles achieves 101% of the ThWIC of a big particle, sometimes that particle is just traded into existence.
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