What is the significance of e=mc

The reason is that whenever you convert part of a walnut or any other piece of matter to pure energy, the resulting energy is by definition moving at the speed of light. Why, then, do you have to square the speed of light? It has to do with the nature of energy. When something is moving four times as fast as something else, it doesn't have four times the energy but rather 16 times the energy—in other words, that figure is squared.

So the speed of light squared is the conversion factor that decides just how much energy lies within a walnut or any other chunk of matter. Here's an example. When a particle meets its antiparticle, they annihilate eachother, leaving only a pulse of energy; by the same token, a high-energy photon can suddenly become a particle-antiparticle pair. A similar process happens far beyond Earth, inside stars. The warmth we feel from the sun, for example, is the result of the energy generated as hydrogen deep within our star continuously fuses to form helium.

And stars don't stop there. When they exhaust their hydrogen, they begin to burn new fuels and create new elements, which are spewed out into the universe when the stars eventually explode, as burnt-out stars are wont to do. Einstein's equation even tells of what transpires at black holes, which can contain the mass of millions of stars. In the first seconds after the Big Bang, energy and matter went back and forth indiscriminately in exact accordance with the equation.

Receive emails about upcoming NOVA programs and related content, as well as featured reporting about current events through a science lens. The equation's legacy extends into realms well beyond the scientific. David Hogg finds it very useful in teaching, for instance. Arlin Crotts notes the world Einstein's equation opened up for us. Jim Gates seconds that. Until Einstein's time, scientists typically would observe things, record them, then find a piece of mathematics that explained the results, he says.

He starts off with a beautiful piece of mathematics that's based on some very deep insights into the way the universe works and then, from that, makes predictions about what ought to happen in the world. It's a stunning reversal to the usual ordering in which science is done. So that's one of the legacies—that we've learned the power of human creativity in the sciences. Or, as Einstein himself might have said, 'to know the mind of God.

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