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Because the speed of light squared ( c 2 ) is a very large quantity, the conversion of even a small amount of mass results in a very large amount of energy. For example, the complete conversion of 1 gram of matter (about 1/28 ounce, or approximately 1 paperclip) would produce as much energy as the burning of 15,000 barrels of oil.
Scientists soon realized that the conversion of mass into energy is the source of the Sun’s heat and light. With Einstein’s equation of E = mc 2 , we can calculate that the amount of energy radiated by the Sun could be produced by the complete conversion of about 4 million tons of matter into energy inside the Sun each second. Destroying 4 million tons per second sounds like a lot when compared to earthly things, but bear in mind that the Sun is a very big reservoir of matter. In fact, we will see that the Sun contains more than enough mass to destroy such huge amounts of matter and still continue shining at its present rate for billions of years.
But knowing all that still does not tell us how mass can be converted into energy. To understand the process that actually occurs in the Sun, we need to explore the structure of the atom a bit further.
For a large part of his life, Albert Einstein ( [link] ) was one of the most recognized celebrities of his day. Strangers stopped him on the street, and people all over the world asked him for endorsements, advice, and assistance. In fact, when Einstein and the great film star Charlie Chaplin met in California, they found they shared similar feelings about the loss of privacy that came with fame. Einstein’s name was a household word despite the fact that most people did not understand the ideas that had made him famous.
Einstein was born in 1879 in Ulm, Germany. Legend has it that he did not do well in school (even in arithmetic), and thousands of students have since attempted to justify a bad grade by referring to this story. Alas, like many legends, this one is not true. Records indicate that although he tended to rebel against the authoritarian teaching style in vogue in Germany at that time, Einstein was a good student.
After graduating from the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, Einstein at first had trouble getting a job (even as a high school teacher), but he eventually became an examiner in the Swiss Patent Office. Working in his spare time, without the benefit of a university environment but using his superb physical intuition, he wrote four papers in 1905 that would ultimately transform the way physicists looked at the world.
One of these, which earned Einstein the Nobel Prize in 1921, set part of the foundation of quantum mechanics —the rich, puzzling, and remarkable theory of the subatomic realm. But his most important paper presented the special theory of relativity , a reexamination of space, time, and motion that added a whole new level of sophistication to our understanding of those concepts. The famed equation E = mc 2 was actually a relatively minor part of this theory, added in a later paper.
In 1916, Einstein published his general theory of relativity , which was, among other things, a fundamentally new description of gravity (see Black Holes and Curved Spacetime ). When this theory was confirmed by measurements of the “bending of starlight” during a 1919 eclipse ( The New York Times headline read, “Lights All Askew in the Heavens”), Einstein became world famous.
In 1933, to escape Nazi persecution, Einstein left his professorship in Berlin and settled in the United States at the newly created Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. He remained there until his death in 1955, writing, lecturing, and espousing a variety of intellectual and political causes. For example, he agreed to sign a letter written by Leo Szilard and other scientists in 1939, alerting President Roosevelt to the dangers of allowing Nazi Germany to develop the atomic bomb first. And in 1952, Einstein was offered the second presidency of Israel. In declining the position, he said, “I know a little about nature and hardly anything about men.”
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