If you were to convert my hand into pure energy using Einstein's equation you could have nuclear Armageddon on a global scale
There is so much mass in here that if you were to convert me into pure energy I could blow up the part
There are very few people in the world we're going to simply say their name you and me we can picture them
Probably many different images of them and one of them certainly is Einstein, right?
I just say that word and all of a sudden you're thinking about sort of crazy white hair and the mustache
Somebody who is brilliant, you know, those those wonderful knowing eyes with lots of smile lines around them
Everybody knows who I'm Stein in and people understand that he was a very famous scientist
But I think that people often don't grasp the true depth and then the profound nature of the things that Einstein introduced to us. I
Also spend a lot of time
Debunking in some ways the myth of Albert Einstein a lot of people seem to think that he was somebody that worked outside of traditional
Academics he wasn't part of the academic
Establishment, he came up with all this brilliant stuff all by himself
Well, that wasn't true either I find was a professor
He actually taught a lot at the University of Bern and also in Berlin and then eventually came to Princeton
He was very much a product of the time and the science that was going on
there were brilliant people at this time science was changing in so many different ways and
For a lot of things Einstein found himself kind of in the right place at the right time
to see two different things going on and say aha those things actually go together and
To me that really was some of the real brilliance of Einstein was became a bridge between many many different subject matters
It amazes me that he was one of the people when he was doing his doctoral dissertation
Figured out the size and speed of the molecules in the air all around you
People didn't realize at the time when Einstein was a younger student in college that era was made of molecules
little things that are constantly bouncing off each other and bouncing off of you and that's what we think of his air and
It became known that there was a tremendous
Number of news I mean to give you an idea
in a
in a best square
Foot of air. I have got a square foot of air of volume in front of me
How many molecules are in a square foot of air the answer is approximately?
10 to the 23 which means a one with 23 zeros after it. That's such a big number
We don't have a name for it and all of those molecules are bouncing off you would hundreds of miles an hour
Can you imagine when they realize that's what air really wants?
I'm signed was a major figure in that and then there were so many other things he did
But I think that if I were to ask you what is mine Stein really known for you know
The thing that would pop into your head even if you don't know what it means is the equation e equals MC squared
So this is something that I have to say
Takes my breath away in the implications of this. It is absolutely incredible what it means
Is that energy pure energy is really the same thing as matter as mass
When we talk about matter, I made of matter made of atoms and molecules and a solid thing
What you're really talking about in many ways the fact that I have math
I have something that you can measure the gravity of I'm a solid substances thing and
you think about energy so maybe an example of pure energy could be a beam of light a
Beam of light has no mass at all. There's no substance to it. It doesn't have a volume. It's just pure energy e
equals MC squared
is
the bridge and this is what Einstein was so brilliant at bridging two very different parts of the universe all at once the world of
matter and the world of pure energy
see in this equation represents the speed of light and
The speed of light is a huge number
So I mean to give it to you just in some units you might be able to understand the speed of light is
186,000 miles per second. So that's how fast light travels through space to through its empty space it would go about
186,000 miles every second and
That's a big number already and to square something means you multiply it by itself
So two times two equals four that's you're squaring two four times four equals
sixteen and you square that
Okay now think about squaring
186,000 and that's in the units of miles per second. That's a big number and
so think about the equation and means mass the amount of
Gravitational force we have and E is energy
What that means literally is that what you are is some super intense almost kind of coagulated form of energy
If you want to convert just a little bit of my mass into pure energy
You would have a tremendous
Amount of energy. Let me give you an example of how much that's true
the the thing that in our experience can actually convert mass into energy is a nuclear bomb a
Nuclear bomb these things are very powerful one called hydrogen bombs
In the case of the the bomb that was first used on the city of Hiroshima in Japan
The amount of matter that was converted into pure energy that killed a hundred thousand people and leveled a city
That was the equivalent to about a third of the mass of a dime. So think about a dime coin cutting in three
That's about how much mass blew up the entire city of Hiroshima
So you can think about the fact that in my hand if you were to convert my hand into pure energy using Einstein's equation
You could have nuclear Armageddon on a global scale
There is so much mass in here that if you were to convert me into pure energy I could blow up the planet
That's an amazing thing to think of is that what you are is?
this somehow
changed modified form of energy and
By the way, you can go the other way too. You can actually turn energy into math
And this is what we do in the particle accelerators all around the earth. I have the wonderful opportunity
This was like being a kid at candy store. I've actually gone to tour CERN which is the largest particle collider in the world
it's in Switzerland and France and
CERN actually has this I believe the the circumference of this circle is about 26 kilometers
we are in Europe these Columbus and it slammed tiny particles together at very very close to speed of light and
In some cases they slam those particles into bigger heavier atoms like gold nuclei or red nuclei
But for a tiny amount of time, you know less than a trillionth of a second they actually create conditions
very very close to what was like a little bit after the Big Bang when the temperature of the universe was measured in
trillions of degrees and
That is so much energy that it creates
Particles. It creates mass just from the pure energy of that collision and that's how we discover new particles. Have you ever wondered?
Why does the particle collider discover new particles?
You get to bigger and bigger energy you collide things
faster and harder together and the more energy you can build up the more massive thing you can make
So you can find more massive particles the higher energy. You juice this Collider up to and
now
Of course
we want to actually design the next generation of colliders some of the things we're hoping to find are maybe things like a
Particle of dark matter we all know the universe is made of this mysterious substance called dark matter
But we have no idea what particle an associate with it. It may be that that particle is massive enough
We haven't been able to build it yet, you know
One of the incredible things about these particle accelerators is that they use Einstein's equations backwards
They turn energy into mass and once you get to a high enough energy
the universe can make anything and one that has that amount of energy in its mass so
That's the way we have found more and more exotic particle
The Higgs boson different sorts of quarks from building blocks of atoms all by getting to these higher and higher energies
Okay, but here's the thing
That really sort of keeps me up at night about the equation
Pure energy like a photon is very very different from you. And I and one of the ways that it's very different
is that it travels at the speed of light a photon does not exist standing still ever in any part of the universe a
Photon is always traveling. That's the speed of light that sort of the definition of its existence and
One of the amazing
Laws that Einstein found was that when you travel close to the speed of light as you approach that speed time
According to your measurements of it your sense of time slows down more and more
If you're going half the speed of light your time slows down quite noticeably if you're going at the speed of light time
ceases to exist
To a photon to the light. That's actually you know, the light that's bouncing off my face right now
The reason you can Feeny is the light
Interacting with me and coming to your eyes
that light does not experience time and it did not experience the distance between
The camera and my face to a beam of light
The universe is a single point of space and time
It's almost fit to a beam of light the universe never expanded all points of space and time collapse into one thing
And yet here we are as matter
Interacting with light we have time we have space. We are moving through time and space I
Am made of pure energy and in a way I'm made of things that don't experience space and time
you know in a very basic sense and then something happens and all of a sudden there is
Gravity, there is time. There is matter there is mass
What actually is that transition what makes something
Massless timeless the no idea that there's a separation in space between objects
That blows my mind, how am I final taneous li energy and matter at the same time
And I think that once we really understand this we're going to be in for some
very difficult truths
To accept it may be that there is no space or time as we know it really
Everything that we know of the space and time is some kind of a projection some kind of a way of viewing this
single thing the
Singularity, that is the universe
If that's true, all space has bait all points of space and time existed once
You know, what about my past and my future are all there according to a beam of light
If we really understand this
we may actually be sort of knocking at the door of what reality is and
Right. Now I have to say we have no idea what the nature of reality itself is. Maybe this will help us get a clue
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