Energy is always the same, but it can take different forms: thermal energy, nuclear energy, mechanical, kinetic, potential, gravitational energy, and so on. And surely you are familiar with the famous formula enunciated by the German physicist Albert Einstein that served to demonstrate that matter was just another form adopted by energy .
This formula, E = mc ^ 2 , first appeared in September 1905 in the article Does the inertia of a body depend on its energy content? , published in Annalen der Physik and changed the course of the history of physics.
In essence, what it means is that the energy corresponding to a piece of matter depends directly on the mass that that matter has in relation, also direct, with the square of the speed of light (3 · 10 ^ 8 m / s) .
Thus, it is easy to calculate how much energy we can obtain by applying this formula, for example, from a gram of mass (0.001 kilograms) and the result is very high: 90 TeraJoules . With that amount of energy, a 100-watt light bulb can stay lit for no more and no less than 285 centuries.
For this reason, in the 20th century this discovery was widely studied and infinite applications were sought for it, some of them very controversial, since, by obtaining large amounts of energy disintegrating very small amounts of matter, which opened the door to nuclear reactions fusion and fission and the era of nuclear weapons in the second half of the century.
Beyond theoretical curiosity?
The question is to ask, could the formula E = mc ^ 2 be used to generate the opposite effect? To convert energy into matter? The answer is yes, but it is of no use beyond mere theoretical curiosity.
And it is that, just as small amounts of matter can be used to release huge amounts of energy, huge amounts of energy are needed to be able to obtain tiny amounts of matter. In fact, in reality, it is almost impossible to get anything other than a subatomic particle (such as an electron) from this reversed process. Can you imagine having to concentrate 90 TeraJoules to obtain nothing more than one gram of matter?
