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I always hear that when protons slam together, they annihilate into pure energy. Then that energy sometimes reforms into other particles. How does that make any sense? Energy is just an arbitrary mathematical quantity.
I always hear that when protons slam together, they annihilate into pure energy. Then that energy sometimes reforms into other particles. How does that make any sense? Energy is just an arbitrary mathematical quantity.
I always hear that when protons slam together, they annihilate into pure energy. Then that energy sometimes reforms into other particles. How does that make any sense? Energy is just an arbitrary mathematical quantity.
I mean it isn't anything physical. It's just the ability to something. The way I've heard this explained, there is a sort of physical energy that floats around after the collision and just sometimes transforms into particles.
I feel like you know what I mean though. You don't get hurt by energy when struck by lighting, you get hurt by electrons flowing through your body, which is an imperfect conductor, bumping into things, which increases the atom's and molecule's kinetic motion. This irregular heat, or kinetic motion, is part of what harms you. A calculation of total energy will tell you how much current, the physical process, will flow through your body. A while ago i asked why string theory was sometimes explained in terms of vibrating strings of energy. The posters came to a conclusion that it was for lack of a better word, and that energy was not a physical entity.
In your example, electronics work due to the electromagnetic force and the fact that electrons repel each other. The higher the electron pressure, voltage, in a sense, the more they physically want to get away from each other. Electricity is just a domino effect of electrons moving within a conductor. Energy is just a way to quantify what we will see happen in the physical world.
I always hear that when protons slam together, they annihilate into pure energy. Then that energy sometimes reforms into other particles.
I won't get into whether or not energy is "physical" or not.
I will say that at no point is there energy just "floating" out there and it "sometimes" reforms into other particles. ALL of the energy of the collision is conserved. Some of it is turned into mass as particles are created, some of it is given to these particles as kinetic energy, and the rest is radiated away as EM radiation.
You can't point to an area in space and say, there is some energy.
... well that was a friendly encounter.
Energy is equivalent to mass, and therefore as physical as electrons, if not more so, even with your definition of physical
Then nothing is physical.I guess I'm just considering something that has coordinates in physical space as physical.
You cannot even be sure that there is an electron.Even with fundamental particles, isn't it the case that you can never know where an electron is in space?
That does not make sense, right.Like in star trek, they run into a cloud looking thing and Spock says it's comprised entirely of pure energy. What the hell is pure energy?
That is incorrect. Whatever source you heard this from is wrong. There are many other conserved quantities besides just energy. There is momentum, invariant mass, spin, charge, etc. All of these quantities are also conserved, so you never get anything which could reasonably be described as "pure energy".I always hear that when protons slam together, they annihilate into pure energy.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/physical
Physical: "adj ... 3. Of or relating to matter and energy or the sciences dealing with them, especially physics"
Energy is clearly "physical".
You are probably thinking of "matter". Energy is not matter, but it certainly is "physical".