Albert Einstein's Theory of E=MC squared
by Daniel

A Special Report

We read this statement as "E equals m times c squared." It says that if you take a certain amount of matter and convert it into energy, you can calculate the number of foot-pounds you will get by multiplying the number of pounds of matter you wipe out by a certain number that is always the same. Or, if you change energy into matter, the same formula will tell you how much mass you get in exchange for your energy.

Einstein did not just say this is what would happen if it could happen. He said it does happen. All the physicists had known that energy can be stored in matter and gotten out again, but they believed that this did not change the amount of matter. Einstein's theory said that when energy is stored into matter, it takes the form of a little additional mass, and when the energy is released, the mass goes back to what it was. In other words, instead of a law of the conservation of energy and a separate law of the conservation of mass, now we had one law, the law of conservation of mass-and-energy. And this suggested a very strange idea. It was not some particular amounts of energy or mass that might change back and forth. If only we knew how, we could change any mass into energy.

No one did much about it for many years. In the first place, no one knew where to start. In the second scientists felt happy enough just having a tidy new theory which helped them calculate things they could not find with instruments and which explained various odd facts they had never understood before. Most of them paid no attention to one letter in the famous equation. That was the letter c. Now in Einstein theory, c stands for speed of light. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. The expression "c squared" means the speed of light multiplied by itself. It gives us a gigantic number, 34,596,000,000. If we do the arithmetic using this number, we find out that from every little mass we get an astonishing amount of energy. When we burn a pound of coal in the ordinary way, we might get 10,000,000 foot-pounds of energy. This is good. If we convert the whole pound of mass into energy, then by Einstein's theory we could get thirty million billion foot-pounds of energy. This is better.

If we only knew how . . . . . .

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