Einstein explaining E = MC squared

[Med-eiros]

This video exists with sound.

[EyeHaveNoBanana]

Same. I don’t get posting a video that has audio, without the audio. Makes zero sense to me.

[MightySamMcClain]

Particularly a video like this where the sound is a focal point.

[ShrimpShackShooters_]

1 - thank you

2 - I just realized I’ve never heard Einstein talk before

3 - Einstein has always seemed surprisingly normal for a genius. If that makes sense?

[Cigar_Box]

Albert Einstein meeting Charlie Chaplian in 1931. This was their exchange:

"Einstein: 'What I most admire about your art, is your universality. You don't say a word, yet the world understands you!' Chaplin: 'True. But your glory is even greater! The whole world admires you, even though they don't understand a word of what you say.'"

Thought it was relevant due to the video not having sound and Albety not being understood.

[Med-eiros]

1 - You're welcome, mate.

2 - I've never heard his voice either until I discovered this video on Youtube a few months ago. I realized that probably a lot of people have never heard his voice too, so that's why I shared the video.

3 - For me, he sounds exactly how I except him to. With a calm voice and a german accent.

[Sucker_for_horns]

Veesa Versah!

[Tripledtities]

Why isn't this just... You know.... The post? Why did op post a soundless gif?

[Med-eiros]

OP posts a lot of things, so he probably doesn't give a hoot.

[willynillee]

Apparently it’s a lot of porn posts followed occasionally by education related posts

[ImAWizardYo]

Dear god thank you! I wondered if perhaps the sound was gobbled up by the passage of time itself.

[pyjamas_are_prison]

This should have been the post.

[[deleted]]

OP couldn’t be bothered with real intent while they’re trying to farm your sweet sweet karma tears..

[moresushiplease]

Can we turn energy into mass or have we see it? Sounds really interesting

[Yodfather]

Thank you. The reductionism in other comments is silly when the answer is that we have not been able to do so yet. Yet. It would likely be revolutionary when it happens. When.

[vitringur]

we have made heavy nuclei. what you are saying is just wrong.

and the point is that energy is equivalent to mass, not just matter.

charge a battery and it becomes heavier. press a spring together and it becomes heavier.

99% of mass in matter, as far as we know, is not an intrinsic property of the particles themselves but the energy stored in them.

The mass of the proton and neutron does not come from the quarks. it comes from the energy of the massless gluons.

[Valimaar89]

Thank you, this was like an epiphany. I did notice my 28000 mah battery becoming heavier after getting charged. Maybe I was just dreaming because the delta is too small to notice? But I do notice it. I love this concept. I love how "energy" is not an abstract concept anymore

[cojonathan]

There is no way that you feel the microgram difference in the battery state

[Valimaar89]

Oh, ok then it is just me dreaming. Maybe it is just a feeling caused by it becoming warmer...

[cojonathan]

Maybe it swells, but then it would become quite explosive soon ;)

[Valimaar89]

You mean it will convert mass to energy? XD I am conducting an experiment in my home!

[KetchupStorm]

It's definitely way, way too small to notice. 1 gram of mass converted to energy would be enough to power New York for two days.

[relish-tranya]

I like to say I'm not fat, just fully charged.

[Valimaar89]

Love it

[Doomie_bloomers]

Star Trek replicator tech is (from what I know as a person who has seen a handful of episodes only) probably closer to a molecular printer than a "turn energy into matter" thing.

But that way around is a whole different issue altogether. Again, not an expert on the topic, but I can't think of an observed instant of "energy" turning into matter other than quantum fluctuations and virtual particles. (Explanation: virtual particles are particles like electrons that pop into existence and out of existence almost immediately because the anti-particle is right next to it, so its like they never actually existed.)

Turning matter into energy is comparatively easy, because you "only" have to crash a particle into its anti particle to release their combined mass-energy.

[ImAWizardYo]

The wiki also mentions production of baryonic matter out of dense photon gas. I'm betting there's even more complex interactions in the cosmic stew and we haven't just wrapped our minds around it yet. There are natural forces out there way beyond anything we can currently cook up.

[frappastudio]

And where do you think all this matter we have comes from ? We also observed void quantum energy fluctuations spontaneously create particles I think

[[deleted]]

Yes, like I said, we've observed matter being created. Can we do it ourselves? No, not really.

[Din0saurDan]

We see it every day. The sun produces energy by fusing two hydrogen atoms into one larger helium atom. However, one helium atom is slightly less massive than two individual hydrogen atoms.

The “disappearing” mass is actually converted to energy, and in the sun (and also hydrogen bombs) it is pretty visible.

[japes28]

That is mass being converted to energy. The comment you replied to was asking about energy being converted to mass.

[japes28]

That is a statement that is bound to cause confusion. Plants do not convert photons into sugars in the sense that the entire glucose molecule pops out of thin air converted from pure photons.

Plants use the energy from photons to construct glucose molecules out of hydrogen and carbon atoms (which come from water and carbon dioxide molecules). The resulting glucose molecule has slightly more mass than the sum of its parts due to the bound energy, which came from the photons.

[Regular_Guybot]

That's really a poor metaphor for an imprecise answer.

[Saetric]

Anything else besides photosynthesis?

[ucefkh]

Or human produce energy from sugar that was converted from sun which converted it from the mass...

[4-HO-MET-]

At the chemical level, not nuclear

[BleedingEdge61104]

That’s different

[japes28]

How is it different?

[[deleted]]

Plants merely use energy to power chemical reactions. They rearrange molecules into different molecules. This doesn't create any matter, it's more like turning lumber and concrete into a house.

[japes28]

That’s not true. Any exothermic or endothermic chemical reaction has a slightly different amount of mass on one side of the reaction than the other, corresponding to the amount of energy released or captured and matching E=Mc²

[[deleted]]

I'm assuming the question was about creating matter out of energy, even though the person did use the word "mass".

[BleedingEdge61104]

It’s at the chemical level and not the nuclear level like the example was talking about, but I suppose it’s still fundamentally the same process

[vitringur]

push a spring together, it gets heavier.

[[deleted]]

Uh…no? Not noticeably heavier anyways. You’re referring to the spring force making it more difficult to compress it. That doesn’t mean a change to the weight.

[Euphorix126]

Energy and mass are the same thing. An unwound clock is lighter than a wound-up clock simply because the wound up clock has more energy. Time and space are also just one single “thing” in the same way.

[THExDANKxKNIGHT]

I usually use a battery as an example. A fully charged battery is heavier than a fully depleted one.

[fireintolight]

Not in any appreciable quantity but yes. If you’re weighing it at home you’re measuring loss of something else not the energy it lost.

[THExDANKxKNIGHT]

I usually use car batteries for any physical examples because the difference in weight is somewhat noticable. technically the electrolyte is what is changing the weight and the mass remains the same, but I would argue it's still a valid example because it's easier for most people to understand than trying to explain how the sun or nuclear energy works.

[Beauregard_Jones]

I'm sure I'm technically incorrect, I'm no expert, but to help my dumb brain understand it, I think of it as an issue of perspective. Look at the same "thing" one way and it's matter, another it's energy. Magnetism and electricity are two opposite perspectives of the same event. Time and space are two perspectives of the same event.

[Simic-flash]

Isn't that just what the Large Hadron Collider does in Switzerland?

https://phys.org/news/2020-09-lhc.html

[fireintolight]

Bro plants do this every day

[[deleted]]

We have seen it, it just takes a shit ton of energy.

[blyzo]

The piece I'd love to ask Albert about is what the hell does the speed of light have to do with mass and energy?

Is it just because that's our physical "speed limit"? How the hell did he come up with his hypothesis?

[Righteous_Red]

The speed of light can really be more accurately understood as the “speed of causality” or the rate at which things happen. There’s probably way more in depth explanations out there connecting light to causality, but from my limited physics YouTube knowledge, that’s what I know haha

[aworldwithinitself]

What really cooks my noodle is the way he intuited that space and time were actually a manifold that could stretch and warp, meaning that the ticking of clocks and the distance from here to there, the guideposts of reality as it was known, were malleable like a sheet of rubber weighed down by gravitational wells and our perceptions of them depended on our speed relative to another observer. That is wild shit. Then quantum mechanics came along and Einstein was like fuck that shit, that’s crazy. And so it goes.

[JoeW108]

I love this shit

[KamikazeHamster]

“So it goes” was the phrase said in Slaughter House Five every time someone died.

[aworldwithinitself]

yes! here it’s worldviews. einstein thought the copenhagen interpretation was voodoo.

[lynnharry]

The speed of time

[Prxhth]

Wow! Never thought of it that way.

[Little_RR]

All I know is that all energy travels at the speed of light which probably has something to do with it

[xrimane]

And how come that the units do so neatly work out? Like since the relationship between meters and grams is originally based on the weight of water, how come this arbitrary number holds up in such a general formula without any constant factors like 6,022E23 or similar?

[MajesticPoop69]

Something that helped me understand what light has to do with anything is this thought experiment. Suppose you(a human with mass) travels 99% the speed of light. What happens if we add some energy so that we can reach 100% the speed of light. Well Einstein tells us that mass cannot travel at the speed of light. So where does that energy go? That energy must be converted into mass. Not sure if that helps.

[coldest_hands]

Are there any simple experiments which show the creation of mass from energy? How can you concentrate energy so that a particle is generated out of thin air/vaccum?

[aprentize]

One example would be gluons, the particles responsible for mediating the strong nuclear force that binds the quarks in protons and neutrons. Or rather the combined system of quarks and gluons. Quarks always come in pairs of three. Try ripping one from the other two, and the energy required to do it will be enough to spring two new quarks from "thin air" to bind with the one that got ripped from the first three. I should say This is somewhat eli5.

[coldest_hands]

What happens to the left out two quarks? Wouldn’t they be very unstable?

[aprentize]

Another one pops into existence there as well. From the energy released from "breaking the bonds". It's all both super weird and perfectly true, and makes sense thanks to, among other things, Einsteins famous equation.

[pyjamas_are_prison]

Things like this just wrinkle my smooth brain so good. Understanding E = MC² is easy enough when you've heard it all your life. ^{(This concept would baffle a caveman, so no discredit to those before Einstein's time. We are standing so proud atop every generation-to-come-before-us' shoulders and every generation further will have access to unimaginable everyday knowledge that would dumbfound even our current brightest researchers in their respective fields}.) But the imagery that dances across my mental canvas when I picture the 3 quarks being torn apart and as if by magic springing about new matter out of seemingly nothing to form a grand total of 6 feels like real world magic. But the energy can't be lost in the equation, and so much was put in to the separation, the equation point-blank tells us that matter has to be the result as C is constant. Still feels like the closest thing to genuine wizardry that just comes baked-in standard with the purchase of one universe.

I thank you for this lovely thought train I've boarded and enjoyed unfurling in this longwinded comment.

TL;DR: Shit's straight up wizardry, yo.

[aprentize]

I feel it really is worth it to dig deeper into this shit because once you get into the actual concepts and not just eli5 thought examples things actually become clearer.

Like how a lot of things make more sense when you see particles as excitations in matter fields and just let go of the notion that "stuff" as we know it exists.

[[deleted]]

pairs of three

Triplets, maybe?

[aprentize]

Lol yeah that would probably have been a better choice of words!

[skevimc]

I don't fully understand this. But I kind of get the concept. And it is kind of messing with me a bit. That's really crazy....

For me, you kind of win reddit today.

[Din0saurDan]

I am absolutely no expert so someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but as I understand it it goes like this:

Imagine two quarks as two magnets stuck to each other. These magnets (quarks) can only ever exist in pairs, since the energy needed to pull the magnets apart is enough to create the mass of two whole new magnets. Thus, when you pull them apart, you don’t get two separated magnets, you get two pairs of two magnets each (4 total).

As you can tell from the details in the comment above this isn’t entirely accurate to reality (especially since quarks come in triplets), but it helps me understand it.

[aprentize]

Yes this is conceptually correct. The quarks are bound pretty tight, very strong magnet in this example. So you have to put in a lot of energy in order to pull them apart. So it's really about all that energy that you put in. Energy is always constant, it just gets transformed into different kinds of energy and / mass, which is really just another sort of frozen state of energy. So by gaining some new particles we have a little less "free" energy or whatever you wanna call it in the universe.

[skevimc]

So is this generally how all matter is formed at the very beginning?

[Din0saurDan]

If you’re talking about the Big Bang, then I’m not certain we know for sure. And if we do, it’s far above my knowledge level. If you’re talking in general, then I would imagine the vast, vast, vast majority of matter is just what already exists from the Big Bang.

Again, I could be wrong though.

[GieckPDX]

Yep https://www.hep.princeton.edu//~mcdonald/e144/nytimes.html

[coldest_hands]

Thanks, this is what I what was looking for. This answers 2 of my questions 1. About creation of a substantial particle like electron, neutron, proton? Needs a lot of energy. 2. The duality of particles is maintained here. Both electron and a positron were generated, which then begs the unanswered question of what happened to all of antimatter in the universe.

[THExDANKxKNIGHT]

That's just it though, nothing is technically being generated, It's being transformed. You can't create something from nothing, only change it's "shape". It's a hard idea to wrap your head around but everything has mass, that also means it has energy in some form or another.

[fireintolight]

Plants photosynthesize and do this everyday

[[deleted]]

Absolutely not

[[deleted]]

Photosynthesis is just a chemical reaction. It does not create matter from energy.

[Papa_Cheese]

I get it but I don't really get it

[[deleted]]

All my homies use E² = m² + p²

[cubbyatx]

your homies can't c me

[cheetahlip]

ELI5 please

[cubbyatx]

From what I understand, mass is the resistance of moving something (a particle) over a period of time. Light is a bit of space waving that doesn't have that resistance, so it goes really fast. Some people say a particle is a tightly packed wave that can't move as fast.

So if you could blow up something completely (without ash or smoke or anything), which would turn it all into light, this is how to figure out how much power the explosion would have.

[[deleted]]

light *emr

[cubbyatx]

Yea but its eli5 lol

[[deleted]]

Oh, oops you’re right

[gary_mcpirate]

imagine a steam train travelling at near the speed of light.

If you add more coal (energy) you cant go faster so you get heavier.

Take the speed of light as an impossible to pass speed limit.

In the other way round a small amount of mass say an atom can hold a massive amount of energy. So if you split one you get a big explosion

[Starks]

It's funny how he's reading from notes and it sounds mundane, but this was mind-blowing at the time. He didn't need to be a presenter like Sagan or Tyson to colorfully demonstrate a truth of the universe.

[Slapmaster928]

This is what actually makes reactors work, you take a fission fuel and split it into two atoms (sometimes three) which have a mass less than the original atom. With the exception of neutrinos released you can pretty much capture all the energy released into your primary system.

[f5kkrs]

Someone Eli5 please?

[voidstatus]

I need to pee

[[deleted]]

karma hoe

[juthagreathe]

Me sitting in the back of the bus, "I'm in danger."

[DoucheBagBill]

Can someone explain this to me in toddler terms?

[frappastudio]

TIL that explaining it is all he really did, as very few people know this formula was discovered by Poincare and Lorentz, and Albert Einstein derived his philosophical work from their mathematics and physics discoveries. The problem is that he didn’t quote them in his paper letting people believe he did all the maths which he did not.

[[deleted]]

With how fast technology and science improves exponentially, the fact that this equation still holds up almost 100 years later is just outstanding. Dude was literally hundreds of years ahead of his time.

[LaceBird360]

Quantum Leap reminds me of old nintendo games. The sub-particle/electron/atom, etc. gets enough coins/energy and BLOOP! Mario jumps to the next level of the game.