Okay.... so what's the difference (or the conversion-ability) between "kinetic" energy and ... let's say... photon energy....?....I mean (I guess I mean) one "causes" the other by breaking "bonds"... but can either one actually make the other out of "whole cloth"... as it were? If not.... why are they both called energy.... as if they are all "transmutable or interchageable"?... asks this scientific naif
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970724a.html It happens all the time. Particle accelerators convert energy into subatomic particles, for example by colliding electrons<http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/dict_ei.html#electron>and positrons <http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/dict_jp.html#positron>. Some of the kinetic energy in the collision goes into creating new particles. It's not possible, however, to collect these newly created particles and assemble them into atoms, molecules and bigger (less microscopic) structures that we associate with 'matter' in our daily life. This is partly because in a technical sense, you cannot just create matter out of energy: there are various 'conservation laws' of electric charges, the number of leptons (electron-like particles) etc., which means that you can only create matter / anti-matter pairs out of energy. Anti-matter, however, has the unfortunate tendency to combine with matter and turn itself back into energy. Even though physicists have managed to safely trap a small amount of anti-matter using magnetic fields, this is not easy to do. Also, Einstein's <http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/dict_ei.html#einstein>equation, Energy = Mass x the square of the velocity of light <http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/dict_jp.html#light>, tells you that it takes a huge amount of energy to create matter in this way. The big accelerator at Fermilab can be a significant drain on the electricity grid in and around the city of Chicago, and it has produced very little matter. Koji Mukai, with David Palmer, Andy Ptak and Paul Butterworth for the Ask an Astrophysicist -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Epistemology" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/epistemology/-/dTqinApVoIgJ. To post to this group, send email to epistemology@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to epistemology+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/epistemology?hl=en.
