Is Einstein's Most Famous Equation Wrong?

[mike wightman]

Squaring a -C should make the answer positive. (I have been helping my daughter with algebra in middle-school, so I remember that from one of her lessons.)

Sorry, yes, I misread how you had constructed the equation.
Problem is you can not have -c in the context in which he originally posted it.

Antimatter is not the same as negative energy.

When energy is used to make a mixture of matter and antimatter you get half of each, recombine them and you get the energy back, less energy lost to the surroundings due to inefficiencies etc.

 

[Enoki]

So ... how would you modify the equation to reflect that half of the energy was in the form of antimatter?
You have still left us hanging.

In an anti-matter reaction the entirety of the mass is consumed, so m = the original mass of the two particles (more or less).

So, for example, you annihilate an electron and positron. The mass is roughly .001 amu. This results in about 1 MEV of energy released. A single fission of uranium releases about 200 MEV, and a single fusion of hydrogen about 4 to 6 MEV (depends on the exact isotope in question).

Now, a proton and anti-proton are annihilated, you get about 1860 MEV released.
So, a hydrogen and anti-hydrogen would release nearly 2000 MEV.
Compare that to fusion or fission. It's about 500 times more output for the mass than fusion. That makes being able to do antimatter pair annihilation a very attractive proposal for energy output.

That's rough, but it gives you a good idea what an antimatter drive would do compared to a fusion one.

 

[atpollard]

Sorry, yes, I misread how you had constructed the equation.
Problem is you can not have -c in the context in which he originally posted it.

Antimatter is not the same as negative energy.

When energy is used to make a mixture of matter and antimatter you get half of each, recombine them and you get the energy back, less energy lost to the surroundings due to inefficiencies etc.

In an anti-matter reaction the entirety of the mass is consumed, so m = the original mass of the two particles (more or less).

So, for example, you annihilate an electron and positron. The mass is roughly .001 amu. This results in about 1 MEV of energy released. A single fission of uranium releases about 200 MEV, and a single fusion of hydrogen about 4 to 6 MEV (depends on the exact isotope in question).

Now, a proton and anti-proton are annihilated, you get about 1860 MEV released.
So, a hydrogen and anti-hydrogen would release nearly 2000 MEV.
Compare that to fusion or fission. It's about 500 times more output for the mass than fusion. That makes being able to do antimatter pair annihilation a very attractive proposal for energy output.

That's rough, but it gives you a good idea what an antimatter drive would do compared to a fusion one.

You are both doing a great job of correcting me, but a terrible job of providing what the OP set out to create ... an equation to represent the creation of both matter and antimatter from a large amount of initial energy.

So far it seems wherever we place the sign for the opposite charge of antimatter, we are wrong. It can’t be placed on the ‘m’ and it can’t be placed on the ‘c’ ... I am pretty sure that placing it on the ‘E’ would also be wrong ... so we are all out of places to place it. I guess anti-matter doesn’t exist after all ... the math says so.

 

[Enoki]

Think of it this way. In electricity, you can have a negative or positive charge:



It isn't the charge that's important here, but rather the amplitude. That is, what you have are two particles that have opposite charges that when put together annihilate each other releasing all their energy.

Each particle has an amount of mass that can be converted into energy. Since each particle is destroyed, all the resulting energy is released. The charge of that energy really doesn't matter. What we're measuring here isn't charge, but rather mass and energy. So, the equation would be E = |(∆m* 931MEV)|

That is, the absolute value of the energy regardless of charge. How's that?

 

[mike wightman]

It is more correct to say antimatter doesn't exist the way some think it does.

Antimatter still has mass, the same mass as its equivalent matter equivalent, it does not have negative mass.

Antimatter does not have 'negative' energy while normal matter has 'positive' energy, they both just have energy.

If you have a certain amount of energy X that you convert into matter and antimatter then you may end up with 0.5X energy stored in matter while 0.5X energy is stored in the antimatter or some other ratio, but the sum of the ratios will be 1X - the original energy value (this all assumes a spherical chicken in a vacuum).