Matter Is Energy; Energy Is Matter
So far, in the story about man’s curiosity concerning the fundamental nature and structure of matter, the development of ideas about structure has been emphasized. We will now take a brief look at a development which strongly influenced our ideas about the fundamental nature of matter.
In 1887 reports appeared on a famous study, often referred to as the Michelson-Morley experiment, which was aimed at determining the earth’s speed through absolute space. The entirely unexpected results of the experiment had a great impact on the concepts of space and time. We will here concern ourselves with just one outcome of the experiment.
In 1905, a young German-born physics student named Albert Einstein, who was working as a patent examiner in Switzerland, published three papers, each of which had a profound effect on a different field of physics.
One of the papers dealt with some peculiar speculations about space and time which began to interest him when he was studying the Michelson-Morley experiment. The contents of the paper are now referred to as the Special Theory of Relativity. This paper contains several predictions that seemed incredible to the average physicist of that day. These predictions have, however, long since been proved valid.
Albert Einstein in 1905.
Courtesy Lotte Jacobi, Hillsboro, New Hampshire
One of Einstein’s predictions had to do with the equivalence of matter and energy. Until 1905 matter had been considered as something that has mass or inertia; energy, on the other hand, had been regarded as the ability to do work. It was believed that the two were as different from each other as, say, a square yard is different from an hour. Einstein’s theory, however, implies that matter and energy are merely two different manifestations of the same fundamental physical reality, and that each may be converted into the other according to the famous equation:
E = MC²
where
E = quantity of energy,
M = quantity of matter, and
C = speed of light in a vacuum.