Thread: The essence of Energy

OK so I am only in highschool and have yet to take a physics course, so lots of my questions will probably be dumb to you guys, but I have been stumping over this one for a few months.

Energy is the ability to move or change matter.
When antimatter and matter collide, there is a 100% matter-->energy transformation.

So what if, in the vaccum of space, the exact same ammount of matter and antimatter collided. There would be all this energy, but nothing for it to affect. What would it do? What would it be? Pretty much, what is energy without matter, or, the essence of energy.

Originally Posted by paindealer

OK so I am only in highschool and have yet to take a physics course, so lots of my questions will probably be dumb to you guys, but I have been stumping over this one for a few months.

Energy is the ability to move or change matter.
When antimatter and matter collide, there is a 100% matter-->energy transformation.

So what if, in the vaccum of space, the exact same ammount of matter and antimatter collided. There would be all this energy, but nothing for it to affect. What would it do? What would it be? Pretty much, what is energy without matter, or, the essence of energy.

tricky indeed.
i too am in high school but we havn't covered energy yet, so i'd take a guess at potential energy as being the answer.

the potential is there for work to be done on an object. if the object were suddenly dropped into the vacuum then work could be done on it.

then again theres the photons.

When a matter and anti-matter particle annihilate they give off the energy in the form of a photon.
It is common speculation that the universe you are in right now is the miniscule remnants of an antimatter - matter annihilation, the matter(or antimatter if you want to look at it like that) being ever so slightly more than the antimatter(0.000000001 difference or something like that), thus we are the left over fraction. You probably have heard this though.


gOOD luck on finding someone to answer your second unanswerable question.

Originally Posted by paindealer

OK so I am only in highschool and have yet to take a physics course, so lots of my questions will probably be dumb to you guys, but I have been stumping over this one for a few months.

Energy is the ability to move or change matter.
When antimatter and matter collide, there is a 100% matter-->energy transformation.

So what if, in the vaccum of space, the exact same ammount of matter and antimatter collided. There would be all this energy, but nothing for it to affect. What would it do? What would it be? Pretty much, what is energy without matter, or, the essence of energy.

Most of the energy would go into electromagnetic radiation - lots of very bright light.

BIG ball of FIRE!!!!

Sorta...

what color would the ball be then ??

red would be most likely.. or violet... or just some gamma radiation?

still. i am not sure that antimatter reacts with matter... i strongly doubt it.. at least... not to pure energy...

it turns to 100% of energy, radiation energy. All the energy will be gamma rays and any living thing nearby will die. MOHAHAHA
e^- + e⁺ = 2 gamma rays

Originally Posted by Zwolver

what color would the ball be then ??

red would be most likely.. or violet... or just some gamma radiation?

still. i am not sure that antimatter reacts with matter... i strongly doubt it.. at least... not to pure energy...

Indeed it does! and the energy convertion is 100%. We have made minuscule(in energy terms) amounts of antimatter in the lab. Further -antimatter/matter annihilation is employed every day in postitron emission tomography.,

Originally Posted by Imaplanck.

Originally Posted by Zwolver

what color would the ball be then ??

red would be most likely.. or violet... or just some gamma radiation?

still. i am not sure that antimatter reacts with matter... i strongly doubt it.. at least... not to pure energy...

Indeed it does! and the energy convertion is 100%. We have made minuscule(in energy terms) amounts of antimatter in the lab. Further -antimatter/matter annihilation is employed every day in postitron emission tomography.,

And there MUST be more than 1 photon so that conservation of momentum can be conserved.

of curse, why do u think i wrote 2 gamma rays?

Originally Posted by Vroomfondel

Originally Posted by Imaplanck.

Originally Posted by Zwolver

what color would the ball be then ??

red would be most likely.. or violet... or just some gamma radiation?

still. i am not sure that antimatter reacts with matter... i strongly doubt it.. at least... not to pure energy...

Indeed it does! and the energy convertion is 100%. We have made minuscule(in energy terms) amounts of antimatter in the lab. Further -antimatter/matter annihilation is employed every day in postitron emission tomography.,

And there MUST be more than 1 photon so that conservation of momentum can be conserved.

Yes yous are right there are two equal and opposite.

nobody ever witnessed an antimatter reaction... :? why so certain that it makes matter disappear ??

becuase when they react we get 2 gama rays or more that have the energy equalent to the amount of matter reacting

yes i know, but who said it had to dissappear.. can't there just be smaller molecules in there then??

like 1 Helium + 1 Antimatter turns into 2 Hydrogen and 2 neutrons + energy

if there is just 1 kind of antimatter, that has the same mass every time, it is just a dissolving particle that is everywhere we look... Just more around smaller molecules, and less around big ones..

or are there more kinda of antimatter? like antisulfur?

becuase there isnt any smaller particle than subatomic ones known, they made a positron and e electron react, the result were gamarays of equal energy their mass represented. and we both know that electron isnt mad eup by smaller particles known yet

And then theres the first law of thermal dynamics that says energy cannot be created or destroyed, just transformed.

If you know the energy of the particles and the resulting photons and they are exactly the same, you know annihilation has occured.

Originally Posted by Zwolver

yes i know, but who said it had to dissappear.. can't there just be smaller molecules in there then??

like 1 Helium + 1 Antimatter turns into 2 Hydrogen and 2 neutrons + energy

if there is just 1 kind of antimatter, that has the same mass every time, it is just a dissolving particle that is everywhere we look... Just more around smaller molecules, and less around big ones..

or are there more kinda of antimatter? like antisulfur?

Because when physics labs react matter with antimatter they observe that gamma rays are produced but not atoms/molecules. It's not like it's hard to detect atoms. If they were produced by matter/antimatter reactions, we would see them.

of course there can be anti-sulphur, but the best one yet observed is anti.hydrogen

Originally Posted by paindealer

Energy is the ability to move or change matter.

INCORRECT!!!!! Everything is energy, including matter (and antimatter) itself.

Originally Posted by paindealer

When antimatter and matter collide, there is a 100% matter-->energy transformation.

Correct. However some of the energy can also be in particle antiparticle pairs. The result is unpredictable. Two photons is only the most likely result. I think it has to be at least two photons to conserve momentum.

Originally Posted by paindealer

So what if, in the vaccum of space, the exact same ammount of matter and antimatter collided. There would be all this energy, but nothing for it to affect. What would it do? What would it be? Pretty much, what is energy without matter, or, the essence of energy.

The most likely result of two photons would have no trouble. Light can move through a vacuum.

Originally Posted by mitchellmckain

Originally Posted by paindealer

When antimatter and matter collide, there is a 100% matter-->energy transformation.

Correct. However some of the energy can also be in particle antiparticle pairs. The result is unpredictable. Two photons is only the most likely result. I think it has to be at least two photons to conserve momentum.

this pretty much depends on the particles in question, if its electron/position with not to muchspeed its almost 100% certain its gamma rays becuase the energy released isnt suffient to produce antyhing else. while antineutron/neutron is capable to produce any possible particle with less mass

I think Cern has made antihydrogen, but they cant contain it in any way.

they have and they can, theoreticly i think they have done it practical for short periods of time, but long times for particles

Originally Posted by Zelos

Originally Posted by mitchellmckain

Originally Posted by paindealer

When antimatter and matter collide, there is a 100% matter-->energy transformation.

Correct. However some of the energy can also be in particle antiparticle pairs. The result is unpredictable. Two photons is only the most likely result. I think it has to be at least two photons to conserve momentum.

this pretty much depends on the particles in question, if its electron/position with not to muchspeed its almost 100% certain its gamma rays becuase the energy released isnt suffient to produce antyhing else. while antineutron/neutron is capable to produce any possible particle with less mass

That is correct of course. At low energies there are few options in an electron-positron collision since the electron is pretty much the lightest particle with mass. It is not certain whether the muon or tauon neutrinos have mass or not, but the electron neutrinos seem to be massless, so an electron neutrino pair would have no where to put the energy. So in order to produce a pair of (different) massive particles from an electron-positron collision, the electron and positron would have to collide with considerable kinetic energy. Producing another electron-positron pair is of course equivalent to a mechanical scattering without annihilation.

I would have to brush up on my quantum field theory scattering cross section calculations to consider why if the muon neutrino has a small mass then why don't we see muon neutrino pair production in electron-positron annihilation. A sense of continuity suggests that the scattering cross section must be inversely proportional to the required (minimum) momentum of the product particles. This kind of makes sense to me since my foggy memory envisions integration of the momentum k from that minimum to infinity of something like 1/(k^2+m^2).

That is correct of course. At low energies there are few options in an electron-positron collision since the electron is pretty much the lightest particle with mass. It is not certain whether the muon or tauon neutrinos have mass or not, but the electron neutrinos seem to be massless, so an electron neutrino pair would have no where to put the energy. So in order to produce a pair of (different) massive particles from an electron-positron collision, the electron and positron would have to collide with considerable kinetic energy. Producing another electron-positron pair is of course equivalent to a mechanical scattering without annihilation.

they have mass, to be able to change from one neutrino typoe to another, wich they can, they must have mass, they are lightest know particle with mass. but it almost never reacts with normal matter

Originally Posted by Zelos

That is correct of course. At low energies there are few options in an electron-positron collision since the electron is pretty much the lightest particle with mass. It is not certain whether the muon or tauon neutrinos have mass or not, but the electron neutrinos seem to be massless, so an electron neutrino pair would have no where to put the energy. So in order to produce a pair of (different) massive particles from an electron-positron collision, the electron and positron would have to collide with considerable kinetic energy. Producing another electron-positron pair is of course equivalent to a mechanical scattering without annihilation.

they have mass, to be able to change from one neutrino typoe to another, wich they can, they must have mass, they are lightest know particle with mass. but it almost never reacts with normal matter

Another indicator they have mass - because they decay. If neutreno's traveled at lightspeed and they would obviously have to exist massless you would see no decay because the halflife would be factored by an infinate gamma.

yepp, they travel at almost C, faster than probebly any other particle in the universe that have mass

Originally Posted by Imaplanck.

Originally Posted by Zelos

they have mass, to be able to change from one neutrino typoe to another, wich they can, they must have mass, they are lightest know particle with mass. but it almost never reacts with normal matter

Another indicator they have mass - because they decay. If neutreno's traveled at lightspeed and they would obviously have to exist massless you would see no decay because the halflife would be factored by an infinate gamma.

You are both refering to ideas for solving the problem of the solar neutrino deficit. Both of these solutions imply that neutrinos have mass, however, I think this physics is far from settled. The neutrino oscillation theory seems to have won out over the idea of neutrino decay. Scientists are still searching for evidence of neutrino decay, but I do not know of any success. Furthermore it looks like attempts to actually measure the mass of the neutrino have not produced convincing results either. It all seems still very much in the air to me.

Whoever said my definition of energy is wrong, this was taken from Encharta Reference Library 2004: the capacity of a body or system to do work. Symbol E

I have a recording of Einstein saying that matter can be transformed into energy and visa versa and are fundementally the same thing, yes. I even have it stated that the matter turns into energy! So what do you want me to say? The energy to energy translation rate is 100%? For all intents and purposes of this thread I must differenciate, and I am using the dictionary definition of energy for every time I say energy.

you can also say it like this, there exist absolutly no energy, only mass. when a object gets energy it gets mass, when it loses energy it loses mass (little but still some) but this kind of things gets in trouble when we talk about photons, so this idea worx only on matter