I understand it’s “energy equals mass times the speed of light squared”, but it’s always portrayed as the most significant equation.
Is this just because Einstein was a popular figure, or is it particularly important in understanding the universe? Moreso than other equations?
In: Physics
All of the above.
Einstein was famous, that helped a lot.
It’s also short and doesn’t use a lot of more complex sciences terms.
It’s useful in that it tells you how much energy a nuclear bomb/ fuel would give off (a certain percentage of the mass is converted into energy). And everyone was obsessed with everything atomic at the time.
It’s not so much fundamental to relativistic physics as it is the culmination.
If you look at all the things that go into deriving the equation you get a pretty quick summary of everything that went into advance physics since Newton.
It’s what happens when a whole bunch of terms in relativistic physics starts canceling out or going to zero.
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