What Constitutes Electrical Energy in an Infinite Electrical Field?

[leright]

You keep saying this, but I think everyone your talking to already knows this and is past freshman physics.

Well, that is the answer Cyrus. If they don't want to except the answer and insist on a deeper understanding then they are wasting their time.

Evidently some people do not understand the definition I am giving them and insist on thinking that the definition only applies to potential energy. Everyone understands work, and all of the energy equations are DERIVED with the idea that energy is the capacity to do work!

I'm not sure what the problem is here...

 

[Rutherford]

Well, how exactly does mass relate to energy in a non-mathematical way? I know that e=mc^2 and all that, but how does this mass get used as energy? And what happens to the mass after that?

 

[rewebster]

Well, how exactly does mass relate to energy in a non-mathematical way? I know that e=mc^2 and all that, but how does this mass get used as energy? And what happens to the mass after that?

Rephrase/paraphrase the question(s)----its not specific enough as it is.(please)



(for me, anyway--)

 

[pmb_phy]

Well, how exactly does mass relate to energy in a non-mathematical way? I know that e=mc^2 and all that, but how does this mass get used as energy? And what happens to the mass after that?

The energy is conserved. Some of it is locked up in mass-energy. This means that the forms of energy can change. So when a nuleus of an atom splits there is an increase in the total kinetic energy of the particles released. Also, when Einstein derived that equation for the first time he used "m" to refer to porper mass. He started out having the body release ennergy. He then showed that the release in energy came with a decrease in the proper mass of the emitting body. The amount of energy radiated E caused a decrease in proper mass of delta m. So delta E = delta mc^2.

That is the meaning of the equation. If you like I can show a website (mine of course) where I post several derivations of this relation. I ask first bercause it appears to me that people rarely read the references.

Pete

 

[marcus]

The thing is, we're talking about elementary particles here. Perhaps energy is the most elementary of all particles. Indeed, E does equal mc^2. Mass is energy. At some point, you can't ask what something is made of. It just is. You have atoms, which are made of nucleons and electrons, which are made ...

there is a paper by Laurent Freidel and Aristide Baratin
that illustrates a current direction in research examining the possibility that matter can be a facet of spacetime geometry

the thing is to get a dynamical model of the geometry
if it is a good model (like their spinfoam model tries to be) then it will contain matter fields (Feynman diagrams) which will appear out of the foam as you gradually turn gravity off.

I am not suggesting that you read the paper, which is technical. But you might like to know it (and others like it) exist.
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0611042
Hidden Quantum Gravity in 4d Feynman diagrams: Emergence of spin foams
Aristide Baratin, Laurent Freidel
28 pages
(Submitted on 3 Nov 2006, last revised 28 Mar 2007)

"We show how Feynman amplitudes of standard QFT on flat and homogeneous space can naturally be recast as the evaluation of observables for a specific spin foam model, which provides dynamics for the background geometry. We identify the symmetries of this Feynman graph spin foam model and give the gauge-fixing prescriptions. We also show that the gauge-fixed partition function is invariant under Pachner moves of the triangulation, and thus defines an invariant of four-dimensional manifolds. Finally, we investigate the algebraic structure of the model, and discuss its relation with a quantization of 4d gravity in the limit where the Newton constant goes to zero."

so you might imagine matter to be facets of geometry---microscopic "kinks" or "twists" in geometry some of which will cancel each other or react with each other---and which affect the surrounding geometry in the way we associate with gravity.
then to understand gravity at small scale would mean to understand the microscopic dynamics of spacetime geometry and matter.