[LES RENDER]

LES RENDER asked the Naked Scientists:
   
DEAR CHRIS

IT WOULD APPEAR READING ABOUT QUANTUM PHYSICS AND EINSTEIN'S THEORIES THAT ENERGY IS THE CREATOR AND MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE
YOUR COMMENTS PLEASE...

I ENJOY YOUR PROGRAMME EVERY FRIDAY RADIO 702
KIND REGARDS
LES RENDER

What do you think?

[Vern]

Back in ancient times we thought of energy as a property of physical things. But now, I suspect that most of us consider energy as being just one of the possible states of physical reality. It shares an equal importance with matter, which is another state of physical reality.

[syhprum]

The mass of nuclei that we perceive is much greater than that of constituent Quarks and is attributed to the energy of the Gluon's

[Vern]

The mass of nuclei that we perceive is much greater than that of constituent Quarks and is attributed to the energy of the Gluon's

Yes; it is very convenient that we have the Gluons which can, by definition, account for the missing mass in nucleons. []

Otherwise we might have to design nucleons so that there is no missing mass []

[yor_on]

First we need to define the concept of energy

In classical physics (theories before Einstein, or/and those not involving quantum physics) energy splits into various definitions, energy of electromagnetic radiation, kinetic energy  (moving bodies), thermal energy (heat), binding energy that is the force that is seen to bind two objects into a 'composite object' etc. They all have the possibility of transforming into each other though, also they can't be created from 'nothing' and neither can they/it disappear, although they/it at times do go up in smoke

Using Einsteins definition of energy relativistic mass and energy are the same physical quantity. If a system has an energy E, it automatically has the relativistic mass m=E/c2. And if a object have the mass m,there will be a equivalent energy to it (E=mc2). If the mass is known then the energy will be too. And 'relativistic mass' is the property defining how difficult it will be to change a objects speed and/or its direction (velocity), it's also called momentum.

The 'conservation of energy' associated with that states that nothing ever disappears (it only transform into other 'states') holds both for 'classical physics' and Einsteins special relativity, but there is a significant difference. In our new definition of energy we speak about a particles 'restmass'. 'Restmass' is a property of any particle when all motion relative its frame of reference disappears as compared to another frame of reference, aka when it's 'standing still'. It will have an energy simply because it has mass (aka 'rest energy') the equation describing it is rest energy = (rest mass)c2. 'Rest energy' is of a extremly high energy quanta, " If you use a television tube to accelerate an electron to 20,000 kilometers per second, the kinetic energy gained is still only about five hundred times smaller than the electron's rest energy."

So now when we have a definition for energy we can start to look at what it describes. Everything have a energy to it when seeing it from Einsteinian physics so in that motto energy is indeed a 'master of the universe'. But it don't explain those different states we see, vacuum, matter, time. So although it seems to describe a 'smallest constituent' of spacetime it can't really explain how, for example, virtual particles can 'materialize' or entanglement where you have two objects able to react to each other instantly disregarding any distance made between them.