What's crazy to me is how when I imagine mass I just think of a boring blue cube with '1kg' written on the side of it. That's boring ol' mass. But energy is like some invisible, super-cool magic that Dragonball Z characters could fire out of their hands if they yelled loud and long enough.
But it's all the same stuff. How does anything move if it's all mass? How does anything stay together if it's all energy?
Same stuff! Fireballs and cubes...same thing!
In crappy Newtonian physics, if you're just sitting around somewhere you have no energy. You're a hopeless lump of mass. But with E=mc2 your energy is equal to your mass times the freakin' speed of light times itself! Just by being a thing that exists you are energy! That's so much more exciting to me being mass. And what you create, what you do, what you exert yourself towards, what you apply energy to has more mass.
But I think we get it reversed a lot of the time. We view ourselves as mass, as a real thing that can be affected and acted upon and we either worry about how we will be changed or allow ourselves to be carried and pushed and pulled by all these chaotic forces and energies that exist outside of us. But it's all perception. You are energy. What can touch you? You impose order and structure and mass outside of you simply by acting on it. The universe will abide.
Shortened to One Sentence: Math explains why you're energy but it still can't explain why you have dreams about being born out of a pile of hummus.
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2 comments:
Yeah I know it's so cool, it's like the coolest thing in the world that mass and energy are the same thing.
People always tend to limit things so much by being so focused on what's tangible and the implicit idea that the world is mass-biased, kinda, that there's nothing that we can't see and that everything is very inflexible. We have a basic tendency to think of ourselves as completely permanent and to put things into different boxes, like mass and energy, and separate ourselves from things like energy. But everything really is connected. I really like what you said about how we worry about how we will be changed.
It's so cool that science has reached this point where we're really starting to figure all of this out. Now with the concept of dark energy in space, it seems like all of what we thought before was empty space is filled with dark energy. It's so amazing and I think that there's a surrounding energy throughout the world and the whole universe.
Haha also your ending is amazing
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