| If it's true that matter can neither be created nor destroyed...
Posted: 1/22/2008 12:22:21 PM | Actually, the energy that we generated in our bodies is transformed into heat. That heat gets lost in the atmosphere. Technically it is correct, energy cannot be created or destroyed, but as soon as it is transformed into heat energy, it is no longer usable.
I have often wondered what happened to all of our memories, our thoughts and our consciousness when we die. Does everything just cease to exist? Is it analogous to pulling the plug on a computer? Or does everything that we have ever known, our very essence just get lost in the form of heat? | |
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| If it's true that matter can neither be created nor destroyed...
Posted: 1/22/2008 1:09:38 PM | | so energy equals mass and mass equals energy, a yin and yang type statement. we know how mass can be turned into energy but not how energy can be turned into mass. if the e=mc2 formula was correct wouldnt energy be infinite? i have been bouncing this around in my undereducated brain for awile now and would appreciate an explanation. the universe as far as i know is expanding outward, things are steadily seperating. stars are on a timeline, as far as i see it all energy is on a timeline. eventually wont everything just fizzle out, mass with no energy? no offense to einstein i am just confused. | |
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| If it's true that matter can neither be created nor destroyed...
Posted: 1/22/2008 2:32:50 PM | Well, with all things considered in the scientific field as far as 'energy cannot be created or destroyed' the theory has not been disproved. This has only held weight where the amount of energy within a system and it's surroundings can be quantified.
What I take from science is that anything is possible until it has been disproved.
Now from the view of conciseness and the soul that may never be quantified or have any sort explanation, I am sure there are some great minds out there that have come up with or discovered brilliant theories. I am also of the belief that the human mind if allowed to function independently from the confines of society can discover truly magical things, I am not one of these people I love math and numbers. | |
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| If it's true that matter can neither be created nor destroyed...
Posted: 1/22/2008 3:28:54 PM | No expanding on the first law - energy is conserved.
The energy is not created nor destroyed so there is a finite amount of energy but so much of it, it would seem infinite to a human mind.
Turning energy into mass is achieved at the quantum level its one of Einsteins good old theories.
A particle can be thought of as both a wavefunction (basically radiation like light) and a particle. Its the duality principle and it was also studied by heisenburg as well and so on.
Now one of the reasons it is so hard to convert energy to mass is demonstrated by the awesome power of explosives. These are breaking down reactions where bonds are broken and energy is given out. Making things, building things require so much more energy to do and require energy and do not give out energy. Hense:
One man can destroy a house in a day but 10 men would take at least 2 weeks! | |
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| If it's true that matter can neither be created nor destroyed...
Posted: 1/22/2008 3:40:33 PM | Oh and for anyone interested the Laws of thermodynamics are thus:
Minus Oneth Law - Heat travels from Hot to Cold
Zeroth Law - If A is in contact with body B, and body is in contact with a body C and A and B are at equilibrium; then A and C are also in equilibrium. Think of A being your tongue, B being the glass case of a thermometer and C being the mercury inside.
First Law - Energy is conserved. Nether created or destroyed basically.
Second Law - There a few definitions dealing with entropy which is to do with the disorder of a system. Basically all systems are trying to get to equilibrium and in doing so energy is lost in the form of heat being the dominant form. So an engine that is 100% efficient is thermodynamically imposible.
Third Law - The entropy of a perfect crystalline solid (at absolute zero) is zero. ie. Disorder is zero (in basic terms) as the bonds are at their lowest energies. | |
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| If it's true that matter can neither be created nor destroyed...
Posted: 1/23/2008 8:26:49 AM | | cowboy could you elaborate about the experiments that turned energy into mass so i could go check them out. i thought that the LHC was trying to prove the higgs risons theory, if you could just point me in the right direction i would appreciate it. | |
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| If it's true that matter can neither be created nor destroyed...
Posted: 1/23/2008 6:48:42 PM | Nuclear fission is nothing but converting mass to energy but converting energy to mass is more difficult which can happen in particle accelerators and black holes. Theoretically if you want to create a 1 Gram of mass you need 9x10^13 Joules of Energy. That’s a lot of Energy. (10 Joule ~= Energy required to move a 1Kg of mass to a distance of 1 meter)
Thermodynamic laws are tested so much that, if any of the theorems violates the Thermodynamic laws, just discard those theorems. | |
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| If it's true that matter can neither be created nor destroyed...
Posted: 1/24/2008 1:57:26 PM | BrightSide,
To me this is a matter of semantics, but I do not see matter being the same thing as energy times a constant. The crux is in the definition of the equal symbol ( = ). I think in mathematical parlance, it does indeed mean "equal," or "identical to," but in reality matter and energy are NOT the same thing. The reality is that one is merely theoretically convertible to the other at a constant ratio minus entropy. I cannot throw a hardball of heat, nor can I heat water with a lump of aluminum.
Linguistically, if they were the same thing, then we wouldn't name them differently. I think of the "=" sign as meaning "equivalent," but not "equal to" or "identical to".
BTW, I think this is a crux issue in other physical math issues. For (my fav) example, mathematically proving that other dimensions are possible does not actually prove they exist. One thing that nature continues to teach me is that it doesn't read our papers. We come up with theories on, say, how many teeth there are in a horse's mouth, but then some danged spoilsport goes out and actually counts horse teeth and finds the math wrong!
It has already been pointed out here that, if we could convert energy to matter, entropic heat would inevitably be produced. Thus, the equation maybe should be re-written to something like
E - aH = MC2
where "a" is a constant and "H" is heat?
But what do I know about physics? Nothing. I'm a wildlifer.  | |
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| If it's true that matter can neither be created nor destroyed...
Posted: 1/24/2008 2:10:36 PM | Cometchc,
I love your original question. It has perplexed humans since the dawn of religion. And it is even more appropriate considering that this forum is for both science and philosophy, two disciplines that have yet to be married.
It all comes down to what you believe about the afterlife. You evidently believe in an afterlife and want to know what you'll be doing next time around. I wouldn't know. Evidently, your beliefs are more philosophical.
I am an athiest. I believe there is no beforelife, no afterlife, that your consciousness is merely your brain's thought process. When the body dies, the brain dies, consciousness dies, and we decompose and our molecules go into the formation of new lives (and rocks). Obviously, I am more scientificly oriented.
If we got married, would our two disciplines become as one?  | |
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| If it's true that matter can neither be created nor destroyed...
Posted: 1/24/2008 7:52:08 PM | Explanation of 'Speed of light' by Vic Stenger, 'For Skeptical Briefs 15, No. 2, September 2004.'
First, what we call "the speed of light in a vacuum" and label by c is technically not the speed of light at all but some limiting speed that an object initially traveling at less than c cannot be accelerated beyond. In principle, if the photon has some mass, no matter how tiny, then it is in fact not going at the speed c but something less.
Note that c is not just a constant but any old constant we want it to be--except zero. It
is just a unit conversion factor we use to maintain the anachronism that distance and time should have different units. The "natural" unit system takes c = 1. | |
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| If it's true that matter can neither be created nor destroyed...
Posted: 1/25/2008 4:28:32 AM | I think a lot of you are confusing energy and matter. Energy isn't matter, that' s not what E=MC2 means, E=MC2 is a conversion ratio of energy into matter and vice versa.
Energy isn't just one thing, it's multiple things. And sometime momentum is confused with energy, I'll explain the basic concept below, but beware they are more difficult to understand than it sounds at first.
Energy and Momentum both measure how systems change. Do not confuse that with how they change over time, just how they change for a general perspective.
Two important forms of Energy to consider are:
Physical Energy is the ability of an object to produce motion, or in other words, how able it is to work.
Kinetic Energy is the ability of an object to change another object it comes in contact with, like running into a wall and suddenly being stopped is due to you not having enough kinetic energy to overcome the wall. This is the basis for mass advantage if you ever heard of that.
Now this still to this day confuses me, but I think I understand it's most basic implications:
Momentum explains how a system changes over distance;
Energy explains how a system changes over time.
There is however no real physical manifestation for Energy (simply put it's a measurable phenomenon of motion over time), and the more I learn about physics, I'm beginning to become convinced that Matter doesn't really exist at all. Empty space and dense Matter become nearly indistinguishable the deep you dive into the inner workings of everything.
My personal definition for matter is something like this: space which is not completely permeable. Permeability is the ability of an object to allow another object to move throw it, guess you could say how solid space is for simpler terms.
Hit enter to late, just so your clear on why don't I die when i stay completely still question (I've heard it from adults and children alike), consider the Earth is moving 600,000 miles per hour through space, and that's just the speed around the sun, not the sun around the galaxy, and galaxy around whatever it's affected by, and so on. With how our universe is structured I really don't think you can find an object completely at rest. | |
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| If it's true that matter can neither be created nor destroyed...
Posted: 1/26/2008 5:25:34 AM |
that link talks about turning something that has low-mass into something with a greater mass. i was talking about turning something with no mass into something with measurable mass. pure energy into matter. has that been done?
Whats odd about your question is I can't think of any method we know of to exchange all mass into energy either. During both fusion and fission only a very small amount of the mass is converted to energy - the rest stays mass. | |
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| If it's true that matter can neither be created nor destroyed...
Posted: 1/26/2008 8:28:17 AM | | photons are light basically right, photons are a massless particle. besides theorys have we ever turned something with no mass into something with mass? that was my original question. there are different ways to interpret whether photons have mass but the qualified answer is no. | |
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| If it's true that matter can neither be created nor destroyed...
Posted: 1/26/2008 11:50:57 AM |
Actually, the energy that we generated in our bodies is transformed into heat. That heat gets lost in the atmosphere. Technically it is correct, energy cannot be created or destroyed, but as soon as it is transformed into heat energy, it is no longer usable.
I disagree with this statement because energy is energy. Yes there are different types of energy that us humans need to label for our own purposes, but the fact its energy is a constant. Heat is energy and energy doesn't just get "lost" it always goes somewhere.
Whether its usable or not is really based on your perspective of whether its usable for you. It doesn't take into account what other purposes it may now be serving. Whether or not you see what that actually is, is irrelevant to a system if your purpose is no longer directly affiliated with that energy. Yes we know "some" of this but there is so much more that we don't know. If it was necessary for the system to work, we would know. We just aren't that important to it in the bigger picture of things.
I seriously believe that everything is connected through energy. It is a highly efficient system. An efficient system doesn't have unnecessary parts and utilizes and re-utilizes its resources. What ever created this system is brilliant because it created one where there is no waste but things just change forms to be utlized for different purposes. These are circular systems as opposed to linear ones.
besides theorys have we ever turned something with no mass into something with mass? that was my original question.
The answer is yes. Its an exciting time for science right now.
"This describes the paradox that quarks, the most basic building blocks of matter, smaller even than protons and neutrons, have a weak attraction when they are close to each other but become more strongly attracted to each other the farther away they are.
“The work he did was very important in terms of what is called the Standard Model of physics,” said William Stwalley, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and head of the physics department. The Standard Model explains current thinking in high energy physics about elementary particles.
You can’t see quarks, Wilczek pointed out, showing a slide demonstrating the movement patterns of a quark, an anti-quark, and a gluon.
“I don’t know which is which,” he told a packed audience in the Physics 38 lecture hall.
Gluons – particles that help hold quarks together – have zero mass, Wilczek noted, and quarks have a mass that is not quite zero but is much less than protons.
“We have produced the feat of creating mass from no mass,” he said, one of the many paradoxes in contemporary physics theory. "
http://advance.uconn.edu/2005/050926/05092610.htm | |
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| If it's true that matter can neither be created nor destroyed...
Posted: 1/26/2008 5:39:40 PM |
photons are light basically right, photons are a massless particle. besides theorys have we ever turned something with no mass into something with mass? that was my original question. there are different ways to interpret whether photons have mass but the qualified answer is no.
To answer your question I don't think there have been experiments that turn either all mass into energy or all energy into mass. That doesn't mean it isn't possible, it means we don't know how. | |
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| If it's true that matter can neither be created nor destroyed...
Posted: 1/27/2008 8:58:33 PM | | We do turn into energy. Our remains r broken down and recycled by decomposers or bacteria. It is then used by plants to start the cycle all over again. There is energy all around us. It can't be created because there is only a certain amount. It can't be destroyed because it is recycled. | |
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| If it's true that matter can neither be created nor destroyed...
Posted: 1/30/2008 11:49:13 AM | | No, like he says anti-matter/matter becomes energy. We don't know what dark matter or dark energy is(it isn't anti-matter which we do know about and have created). There is some hope that LHC collider will help better define what constitutes dark matter. There are also "dark collector" type experiments going on in several places in the world, but so far nothing has come from them. | |
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