Interestingly, when you count all the particles before and after the process, you’ll find the total mass of the latter is slightly smaller than the former. By the process through which fission splits uranium atoms, for instance, a huge amount of energy, along with neutrons, is released. It didn’t take scientists too long to realize there was a massive amount of energy waiting to be exploited.

We now had a new way to measure a system’s total energy simply by looking at mass, which is a super-concentrated form of energy. Millions of people recognize it and can write it down by heart even though they might not understand anything about the physics involved.īefore Einstein, mass was considered a mere material property that described how much resistance the object opposes to movement. For Einstein, however, relativistic mass - which now takes into account the fact that mass increases with speed - and energy are simply two different names for one and the same physical quantity. It’s been featured in countless novels and movies. It’s printed on coffee mugs and T-shirts. This deceivingly simple equation can be found everywhere, even in pop culture. On November 21, 1905, physicist Albert Einstein published a paper in Annalen der Physik called “ Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?“ This was one of Einstein’s four Annus Mirabilis papers (from Latin, annus mīrābilis, “Extraordinary Year”) in which he described what has become the most famous physical equation: E = mc 2 (energy equals mass times the velocity of light squared). ADVERTISEMENT From Einstein to nuclear weapons

Fission equation