Dear fellow students
If you could convert all of the energy contained in 1 kg of sugar, or 1 kg of water, or 1 kg of any other stuff, you could drive a car for about 100,000 years without stopping!
Why? Albert Einstein, in 1905, wrote down the famous equation E=mc2. It says that mass is a very concentrated form of energy.
Energy is like the 'money' of nature; it comes in two different currencies, and with an enormous exchange rate - the square of the speed of light .
kg corresponds to 25,000,000,000 kWh of energy; 1 gr would be enough to supply energy to a medium-sized town for a whole day!
But how can energy be transformed into matter, or vice versa?
We do not have the technology to make a space ship go at the speed of light (300,000 km/sec), but it is possible - using accelerators at CERN - to make single particles (like a proton, the nucleus of a hydrogen atom) go that fast.
If a particle moving with this speed hits a block of material, its energy is also transformed,......
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