If Energy cannot be created or destroyed, how can there be a beginning to the Universe ?

Does a lump of coal contain energy?

What happens to the lump of coal when it is converted to energy?

Where is the "matter" of the lump of coal after it has become energy?

 

I am glad to see that you agree that matter is not energy unless its "converted" to energy.

 

Yeah, I wasn't super specific by my use of the word created. I would probably use something vague like "matter can come into being" or something like that.

I would say matter is a form of energy, although that depends on a bunch of semantics too. Kinetic energy is the energy related to movement, so in one sense, you might say that speeds or velocities are a type of energy, but on the other hand, speed is speed and energy is energy.

However, when one says "energy cannot be destroyed/created, only transformed into different forms", matter is one of the forms which energy can take. If you collide two electrons to combine for instance a Z boson, the amount of mass you have will go from ~2*0.5 MeV/c^2 to ~91 GeV/c^2. However, the energy has to be the same (in other words, the kinetic energy of the electrons have to be large enough to bring the total energy up to 91 GeV).

 

Your grasp of the subject "matter" is tenuous at best.

How did that lump of coal originate?

From a piece of wood that was part of a tree?

Where did that tree come from?

From a seed that used photosynthesis, AKA energy from the sun, to convert carbon dioxide in the air into sugars that become the wood that comprised the tree.

So now we have matter formed using energy and then that energy is stored in the form of matter until it is released in via combustion.

This is very simplified but it is based upon the E-MC2 principle that matter and energy are just different forms of the same thing.

 

Coal contains two types of energy (well, probably more, but two that are relevant here). When you burn coal, you release energy which was stored as chemical energy in the coal. That energy becomes heat, which you can collect. However, the carbon combines with oxygen in the air and becomes carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide, and is still quite present (I ignore all other materials present in coal).

However, the vast majority of the energy in coal is the rest masses of the carbon. However, that does not get released by burning it. We don't have any efficient ways of accessing this energy, except for some specific elements, like uranium, and even then, we only get out a tiny fraction of the energy which stored in the material. That is the energy which is described by E=mc^2.

 

Wow, That is cool! I don't suppose I could trouble you to write a key for that diagram?..

 

So first energy is converted to matter, then the chemical reaction (burning) converts matter to energy.

E=mc^2 only helps you understand what 'quantity' of energy to expect from matter if you 'convert' it to energy. It is not energy in itself.

Mass and energy are closely related. Due to mass–energy equivalence, any object that has mass when stationary (called rest mass) also has an equivalent amount of energy whose form is called rest energy (in that frame of reference), and any additional energy (of any form) acquired by the object above that rest energy will increase the object's total mass just as it increases its total energy. For example, after heating an object, its increase in energy could be measured as an increase in mass, with a sensitive enough scale.

 

You mean like writing out what's what? Sure.

This picture has two diagrams, so the stuff on the left and the stuff on the right are different (although similar) processes. Protons contain mostly quarks and gluons (as well as antiquarks, but they're written as quarks in this diagram), quarks are labelled q. This process shows the interaction of two quarks inside two protons, flung at one another at close to light speed (although technically, they can be read at any angle, if you turned it 240˚, the diagram would still work, it would just have different probabilities of happening, and you'd be less likely to find the right particles to collide).

In both of the diagrams, the quarks bounce off one another, and the way they do that is by sending a force carrying particle between them. In this case, they send W or Z bosons (as labelled). Which one sends and which one receives the particle doesn't matter, in fact, when you run through the maths, it's not so much one that sends and one that receives as it is two particles exchanging a force carrying particle.

This particle (the W or Z) is really energetic (basically, it describes the bounce between two things that travel at almost light speed in opposite directions, so it's very energetic), so after the bounce, the quarks fly off in different directions. However, the protons consist of three quarks and some "quark gluon soup" (basically just a soup of particles which fluctuate in and out of existence all the time). After the bounce, one of these quarks (in each proton) bounces off in some other direction, effectively tearing the proton apart.

The W and Z bosons are relatively heavy, they weigh around 85 times as much as a proton. Higgs bosons are closely related to masses, and it turns out the heavier a particle is, the more likely it is to turn up with Higgs bosons. These bounces are quite common at the LHC, and Ws and Zs are so heavy that Higgs bosons often turn up next to them, so all in all, this is one of the most likely ways of producing Higgs bosons at the LHC (although the picture is from an earlier experiment).

Higgs bosons, however, are not stable. They cannot sustain themselves, but they break after a tiny fraction of a second. Again, because they are related to mass, when they break, "decay", they turn into pairs of other particles, the heavier they are, the more likely it is. This particular diagram shows them decaying to tau leptons, which are basically the heavier brother of electrons. They will in turn decay before they reach any of our detectors. Higgs bosons can decay to a lot of other stuff to, for instance the W and Z bosons, which as I mentioned are very heavy.

Quarks come in many different types, "flavours" as they are called. When a particle gives off or collides with a W boson, they change flavour, but when they collide with Z bosons, they stay the same, that's why some quarks are labelled q and others q'.

I hope that made any kind of sense.

 

I forget the term, but theres a phenomena proposed that energy 'leaks' into our dimension from others (and presumably out as well). As an example, the energy that appears to be 'created' from certain electrohydrolosis processes is attribited to this 'leakage' of which I cannot remember the proper term for.

If true, the dynamic for conservation of energy remains true, but is far less useful in understanding our universe, as it would be immeasurably and unpredictably influenced by other universes.

 

With the 'possible' exception of radioactive material matter as energy does not exist unless you have matter in motion which is potential energy until it collides with something. Hence burning, a chemical reaction, electricity ect sets matter in motion.

In physics, energy is the property that must be transferred to an object in order to perform work on, or to heat, the object.

A stationary rock at ambient temp does none of the above.

 

It is apparent your understanding of physics is insufficient to discuss it accurately.

 

go for it then.

 

You need to think through what you are proposing, as "assembled" is a word that actually means something.

 

Wow, that is to physics what falling off the edge of a flat earth is to modern cosmology.

 

go for it then.

 

do you need for me to explain it to you is that what you are asking?

 

The mass in E=mc^2 is the rest mass, so the mass when standing still. Interestingly, it is actually a special case of a more general equation

E^2 = m^2 + p^2

where E is the energy, m is the rest mass, p is the 3-momentum (unless you consider some weird geometries, it's basically the normal momentum) and c has been set to 1. (basically, the c:s in E=mc^2 doesn't have anything directly to do with light, it is just a result of us humans representing masses and momenta using the units that we do. Therefore, in physics, they are often ignored, or rather, the c^2 is absorbed in the unit.)

If the particle is standing still and therefore has no momentum, this reduces to E=m (which is just E=mc^2 with natural units, i.e. c=1). For a particle with no rest mass, like light, it becomes E=p (which is E=pc with natural units, which is the normal photon energy equation).

Given the form of the equation, one can see that rest mass energy and kinetic energy are intimately linked. Especially in cases when m and p are both non-zero, in which it even becomes impossible to express the kinetic energy without taking the rest mass energy into account. The non-relativistic versions, like kinetic energy K = m(v^2)/2 are approximations of a special case of the relativistic equation. If you take the full form into account, they are part of the same quantity, which makes it quite hard to argue that one is an energy if the other is not.

However, it takes quite a lot of energy to "unlock" these energies. Just like coal won't give you any heat unless you light it on fire, the energy within a particle won't give you any energy unless you manage to access it. This happens at the LHC, as well as in radioactive decays, but not so much in ordinary life.

The semantics of whether mass is to be counted as an energy or not is not so interesting. If we count it as an energy, then conservation of energy holds. If we do not, then conservation of energy will not hold (if you start messing about with the masses, that is). Given that conservation of energy is a useful concept, we like to consider it an energy. Just like we had to add the concepts of thermal energy or electric fields to our energy models when it turned out that it was useful to think of heat/fields as an energy, we can do the same with mass. We don't super-have-to, energy is just a word, we can do the same math using other words if we really want to, it's just convenient, and certainly widely used.

 

It makes perfect sense, thanks. It's great when answers like this come around.

So is what you end up with, the two leptons and two quarks, more massive than the two quarks that went into it?

 

Far better explanation than I was able to achieve so thank you very much.

 

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Kokomojojo said: ↑
With the 'possible' exception of radioactive material matter as energy does not exist unless you have matter in motion which is potential energy until it collides with something. Hence burning, a chemical reaction, electricity ect sets matter in motion.

In physics, energy is the property that must be transferred to an object in order to perform work on, or to heat, the object.

A stationary rock at ambient temp does none of the above."
All matter is in constant motion at the atomic level. Radiation is not limited to Uranium and such, it is a fundamental property of most forms of matter, YOU radiate infrared radiation (heat) and light is radiation as examples. Energy IS NOT momentum, but momentum contains energy and a stationary rock at room temperature (whatever that is) contains thermal energy as you would note when the "Room" gets colder.

 

Glad it could be of help.

The quarks will have the same rest mass they did before the bounce, and now there are some extra leptons (and they are quite heavy) so the total amount of stuff has gone up. All the stuff that was there in the beginning is still there, but now there's also extra stuff.

 

And you'd still say that, throughout the whole process, the net sum of energy/mass remains the same, right?

 

Yes, if you consider mass to be a form of energy, energy is conserved. If you don't consider it an energy, I guess you could say that energy is converted to mass.

 

So our understanding of the laws of physics has not changed, but now we have an example of a process by which energy can be converted to mass,.. I guess.

 

just like trading stock lol