Unfortunately, given that we don't know any natural sources of antimatter, the only way to produce it is in particle accelerators and it would take 10 million years to produce a kilogram of it. Bring them together, though, and they will annihilate each other into pure energy. Particles of matter and antimatter are the same, except for an opposite electrical charge. One way to turn an entire block of material into pure energy would be to bring it together with antimatter. Nuclear fission is one of several ways to release a tiny bit of an atom's mass, but most of the stuff remains in the form of familiar protons, neutrons and electrons. Unlocking that energy is no easy task, however. A 100kg person, therefore, has enough energy locked up inside them to run that many homes for 300 years. More practically, it is the amount of energy that would come out of a 1 gigawatt power plant, big enough to run 10 million homes for at least three years. That is the equivalent of more than 40 megatons of TNT. There is a lot of energy condensed into matter - 1kg of "stuff" contains around 9 x 10^16 joules, if you could somehow transform all of it into energy. That missing matter has been converted to energy and you can calculate how much using Einstein's equation.ĭespite the tiny discrepancy in mass between the uranium atom and its products, the amount of energy released is big and the reason why is obvious when you look at the c² term in the equation – the speed of light is a huge number by itself and its square is therefore enormous. If you made very precise measurements of all the particles before and after the process, you would find that the total mass of the latter was very slightly smaller than the former, a difference known as the "mass defect". The process of fission releases energy and further neutrons that can go on to split more uranium atoms. Nuclear power stations exploit this idea inside their reactors where subatomic particles, called neutrons, are fired at the nuclei of uranium atoms, which causes the uranium to split into smaller atoms. Mass is just a super-concentrated form of energy and, moreover, these things can turn from one form to the other and back again. In Einstein's new world, mass became a way to measure the total energy present in an object, even when it was not being heated, moved or irradiated or whatever else. Beforehand, the mass of something in kilograms was just a measure of how much stuff was present and how resistant it was to being moved around. In relativity theory, Einstein introduced mass as a new type of energy to the mix. All these types of energy can be transformed from one to another, but nothing can ever be created or destroyed. Before Einstein, scientists defined energy as the stuff that allows objects and fields to interact or move in some way – kinetic energy is associated with movement, thermal energy involves heating and electromagnetic fields contain energy that is transmitted as waves. Like all good equations, though, its simplicity is a rabbit-hole into something profound about nature: energy and mass are not just mathematically related, they are different ways to measure the same thing. It says that the energy (E) in a system (an atom, a person, the solar system) is equal to its total mass (m) multiplied by the square of the speed of light (c, equal to 186,000 miles per second). At one level, the equation is devastatingly simple.
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