Thursday, May 25, 2017

special relativity - Why doesn't $E = mc^2$ contradict the conservation of mass principle?


I was watching this very interesting video: The mathematics of weight loss


and at 12:35 the presenter says: "(...) people think that you can turn atoms into energy. It's one of the founding principles of modern chemistry: you cannot turn atoms into pure energy. It's called the conservation of mass."


Einstein's famous equation immediately came to my mind: $$E = mc^2.$$


Isn't that equation saying you can turn mass into energy and vice versa? Doesn't that contradict the conservation of mass principle then?





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classical mechanics - Moment of a force about a given axis (Torque) - Scalar or vectorial?

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