Transformation of energy into matter

I didn't find anything on this by searching so hopefully somebody has some ideas.

I remember from an Astronomy class that after the Big Bang there was supposedly all energy and that this energy became matter. That was pretty much all that was said on the subject. Anyone know more about this subject?

I started visualizing that all matter is really energy bound up into circular rotations that creates the perceived effects of matter. I remember hearing that the energy left from the Big Bang "cooled" and became matter. Any thoughts?

This is an extraordinarily complex issue; one I hope to delve into after I satisfy my craving for DS9 episodes.

I'll try to leave you inspired with this statement, however: a similar method that we all experience that features the transmutation of energy into matter happens right inside of your mother's womb while she is pregnant with you. Does it not?

albeit, it's far more complex than that, but that's a pretty simple analogy that can be compared to the conversion, at least on a partial level, of energy into matter or mass.

Energy is defined simply by scientists as the capacity for doing work. Matter is the material (atoms and molecules) that constructs things on the Earth and in the Universe. Albert Einstein suggested early in this century that energy and matter are related to each other at the atomic level. Einstein theorized that it should be possible to convert matter into energy. From Einstein's theories, scientists were able to harness the energy of matter beginning in the 1940s through nuclear fission. The most spectacular example of this process is a nuclear explosion from an atomic bomb. A more peaceful example of our use of this fact of nature is the production of electricity from controlled fission reactions in nuclear reactors.

Einstein also suggested that it should be possible to transform energy into matter. In 1998, researchers at Stanford University's Linear Accelerator Center successfully converted energy into matter. This feat was accomplished by using lasers and incredibly strong electromagnetic fields to change ordinary light into matter. The results of this experiment may allow for the development of a variety of technological gadgets. One such development could be matter/energy transporters or food replicators that are commonly seen in some of our favorite science fiction programs.

Energy and matter are also associated to each other at much larger scales of nature. Later on in this chapter, we will examine how solar radiation provides the energy to create the matter that makes up organisms. Organisms then use some of this matter to power their metabolism.


Matter is the material that makes up things in the Universe. All matter on the Earth is constructed of elements (see WebElements for the periodic table of elements). Chemists have described approximately 115 different elements. Each of these elements have distinct chemical characteristics. Table 6a-1 lists some of the chemical characteristics for 48 common elements found in the Earth's continental crust.

The smallest particle that exhibits the unique chemical characteristics of an element is known as an atom. Atoms are composed of yet smaller particles known as protons, neutrons, and electrons. A proton is a subatomic particle that has significant mass and contributes a single positive electrical charge to an atom. Neutrons also have significant mass but no electrical charge. Electrons are extremely light subatomic particles having a mass that is 1/1840 of a proton. Each electron also has a negative electrical charge.
www.physicalgeography.net...

So far we have learned that energy can take on many forms. One important form of energy, relative to life on Earth, is kinetic energy. Simply defined, kinetic energy is the energy of motion. The amount of kinetic energy that a body possesses is dependent on the speed of its motion and its mass. At the atomic scale, the kinetic energy of atoms and molecules is sometimes referred to as heat energy.

Kinetic energy is also related to the concept of temperature. Temperature is defined as the measure of the average speed of atoms and molecules. The higher the temperature, the faster these particles of matter move. At a temperature of - 273.15� Celsius (absolute zero) all atomic motion stops. Heat is often defined as energy in the process of being transferred from one object to another because of the temperature difference between them. In the atmosphere, heat is commonly transferred by conduction, convection, advection, and radiation.

www.physicalgeography.net...
www.lns.cornell.edu...

www.nirond.be...

Q: I know that matter can be converted into energy. Is it not possible, then, that energy can be converted into matter? If so, how?


A:
You bet! Particle physicists make this kind of reaction happen every day in laboratories. This accomplished by accelerating ordinary particles up to very high speeds, close to the speed of light, and smashing them into each other. In an interesting collision, the result is a spray of new particles, many of which may be heavier than the original pair that collided. The energy of motion of the orignal particles has contributed to creating new ones. Some of these new particles are very interesting and exotic! Most only live for a short time before decaying into more ordinary stuff.

It is in this way that scientists have found out what kinds of particles exist. The world is made up of stable particles, and we only know about the unstable ones because we have been able to create them in the laboratory out of the energy in the collisions.

There are rules of course. Whenever a particle is made, certain things have to add up. The energy has to add up, of course. The total electrical charge cannot change, and so when many kinds of particles are made, the same number of antiparticles must also be made (some particles are their own antiparticles so you can make one of these at a time. Photons are examples of this). Antimatter annihilates with corresponding matter particles, and the result is eventually photons, leaving no net new matter.

Scientists are currently studying the differences between matter and antimatter in an attempt to explain why the world contains so much of one and none of the other.

van.hep.uiuc.edu...


Albert Einstein's epochal insight into the equivalence of matter and energy, elegantly expressed as E=mc2, has been confirmed countless times, most dramatically whenever a nuclear weapon detonates. The process also occurs naturally--a star shines because atoms in its core fuse, transforming a sliver of matter into light. And when particles of matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate each other in a blaze of energy.

But like any equation, E=mc2 works in both directions, at least theoretically. That is, it should be possible to convert energy into matter. Now a team of physicists has accomplished just that: they have transmuted light into matter. "We're able to turn optical photons into matter," says Princeton physicist Kirk McDonald, coleader of the team. "That is quite a technological leap."

Of course, physicists would have been shocked if they couldn't get energy to convert into matter. After all, the entire universe began with an explosion of energy--the Big Bang. And physicists who smash atoms together have witnessed the conversion of energy into matter--"virtual" photons that flit in and out of existence just long enough to spawn the particles of exotic matter routinely observed in particle accelerators. But such virtual photons aren't under the direct control of physicists; these photons arise as part of a complex chain of events starting with a collision of two particles of matter. Until now, no one had directly created matter from light. "Back in 1934 physicists realized that it would be possible to do this in principle," says McDonald, "But it just wasn't technically feasible."

By the early 1990s, McDonald and his colleagues had all the technological pieces in place to conduct such an experiment. The key piece was a laser capable of packing a tremendous amount of energy into a small space. The laser that McDonald and his collaborators use at Stanford generates a trillion watts of power, enough to light every home in North America. But rather than drain the national electric grid, the laser takes a rather ordinary amount of energy and compresses it into a pulse for about a trillionth of a second. By focusing this pulse on an area of just 16- millionths of a square inch, the physicists bathe a spot with an incredibly intense electromagnetic field. But even with this crowd of high-power photons squeezed together, the energy is still only about a millionth of what's needed to make matter.

The problem is that the laser's green-light photons don't pack much of a punch. McDonald needed a way to boost the energy of these photons. He and his colleagues knew that a photon, which is massless, can sometimes siphon off part of the energy of a high-speed particle with mass. This occurs because the total energy of the particle, which includes its mass, may exceed that of the photon, just as a truck moving at 60 miles per hour may have more total energy than a sports car traveling at 70.

At the Stanford Linear Accelerator, a two-mile-long drag strip for subatomic particles, McDonald found just what he needed. The accelerator drives swarms of electrons to speeds close to that of light. When McDonald shot photons from the laser at the racing electrons, the photons ricocheted off, absorbing so much energy that they changed from run-of-the-mill green photons to powerful gamma rays. These gamma-ray photons then merged back into the intense stream of green-laser photons, and when a group of photons with the right energy crowded close enough together, out popped a pair of particles: an electron and its antimatter twin, a positron. The reaction is the reverse of the usual matter- antimatter annihilation: the blaze of energy becomes matter.

The method isn't foolproof. Of about 22,000 beams fired into the Stanford accelerator, just over 100 pairs of particles materialized. With the development of increasingly powerful lasers, McDonald estimates that in another five or ten years this may be an efficient way to make small amounts of antimatter. But the technique will never generate a cheeseburger. For example, even if all the sun's power could be focused on one spot, there still wouldn't be enough energy, says McDonald, to make even an ounce of matter.

www.hep.princeton.edu...

[Edited on 30-3-2004 by SpittinCobra]

i hope this helps! i tried to say it all as simply as possible, if you want me to elaborate or explain anything just ask.

Chronology of the Big Bang

0 to 43 X 10^-43 seconds:
- planck time
- very hot and dense (density 10^90 kg/cm^3; temperature: 10^36 K)
- 4 forces (gravity, strong force, weak force, electromagnetic) united

10^-35 seconds
- inflation fo the universe; universe explands
- gravity departs from other forces

10^-6 seconds
- matter forms as universe cools; quarks come together and form neutrons and protons
- end of the energy dominant epoch

3 seconds
- hydrogen, helium, and trace lithium form
- electromagnetic force leaves the strong and weak forces; electrons form
- begginning of the matter dominant universe

500,000 years
- recombination; electrons, protons, neutrons come together to form atoms
- galaxies begin to form from vast clouds of hydrogen gas; exactly how is unknown

Question - In the matter of converting energy into matter, so far as
I've been able to find out, or rather to not find out, no experiment
exists in which energy is converted into matter with out the intermediary
of matter, e.g., fast moving particles. That is, the energy in question
is usually (always?) the kinetic energy of particles. The claim is that
in the early moments of the big bang matter hadn't yet formed. So when it
was finally formed, what was it formed out of? Presumably matter was
formed out of energy of which there was a super abundance. So how did
this happen? I'd like to know of an experiment in which the m*c*c's after
the event is accounted for by just the total E before the event. I can
see that once just even a smidgen of matter is somehow created, it can be
used to create more matter through collisions and fusions, etc. What I
want to know is how to get the whole thing started, i.e. how to get the
first instance of matter. Somewhere in all of this ramble is my
question. It's been decades since I studied physics, and even longer
since my father in law (Joseph Walters C.), who instigated this query,
did. So humor us a bit. What are we over looking?

www.newton.dep.anl.gov...


I hope that answers all your questions, or gets you an A.

The last part of that article is very interesting. There is a serious limitation here, and we probably will never know.

Matter - Energy - Matter - Energy ad infinitum

You might then wonder how all the universe energy got into one location to
begin with. One theory states that the universe expands and collapses
repeatedly. When collapsing, all the matter gets so compact that it changes
into heat, like a super-giant star collapsing. It then explodes, changing
into matter when there is enough room to do so. The matter, with a great
deal of kinetic energy, expands. As it does this, small pieces of matter
join into larger pieces, eventually becoming stars. After expanding for
perhaps trillions of years, the matter starts pulling back together. The
whole process repeats forever. The universe had no actual beginning and
will not really ever end.

If there is only one explosion, then we cannot scientifically talk about
what was before the explosion. Before the universe began to exist, before
the explosion, time as we know it hadn't actually started. We cannot even
truly state what the universe was before the explosion. We know it was
energy, but we do not know the kind of energy.

I didn't realize matter had been created. Very interesting.

After I posted this question I didn't realize that I was going to keep wondering about it. I started to wonder if the rapid expansion of space itself caused vortices or strings or forces to develop that caused energy to be caught up in a bind or possibly a bound spherical shape around these forces which we perceive as the basic particles of matter.

I'm not sure how or if anyone could ever test a theory of rapid expansion of space in an area of extremely high energy unless that was already done without anyone thinking about it. (just a thought, a micro burst of rapid space expansion in the vicinity or location of the high energy)

I know we can detect the slow expansion of space itself over vast distances but detecting rapid expansion of space in a small area I don't know about.

I agree that this is a complex issue. Thanks for responding.

The Prashnopanishad expounds the Hindu concept of the evolution of the physical world. Expressed concisely, Energy (Pr�na) and Matter (Rayi) are at the two ends of the cosmic scale. The Energy is dormant in pure Matter and vice versa. The transformation of Energy into matter occurs in stages: Energy to Reason to Consciousness to Life to Matter. The transformation of Matter into Energy traces this path backwards. The Universe itself is a result of the interaction of Energy and Matter. In fact Prashnopanishhad goes so far as to declare that the difference between Energy and Matter is only perceptional, not real. In other words, Energy and Matter are fundamentally the same.


www.bnaiyer.com...

I thought that might be intresting about the Hindu religion and how it for them connects to "Transformation of energy into matter."

Sorry if it doesnt fit the topic to well.

Out,
Russian

BUMP!!!

This months issue of New Science has an article with concluding evidence that for the first 10 microseconds after the Big Bang the universe was a liquid.

The used the particle accelerator in NY to stream gold atoms together recreating the initial environments of the big bang. They mentioned quarks and gluons being held together by a vacuum. So when it exploded outward, the high concentrations of quarks and gluons packed together so tightly during the intial creation of the vacuum that it would have the properties of a liquid as opposed to a gas.

A very interesting article.

Here is the same article posted in New Science.

Big Bang Liquid

I found an interesting article this am and think it may fit into this conversation nicely. Although I am not of a scientific mind I found this article exhilarating. OK heres why, in my UFO sightings one thing I always noted was the fact (to me) the lights did not look like artificial or the type of light that we use in ordinary life. They somehow looked more natural to me, not man made. Is it possible this is the begining of something new or is it old technology with a new twist?

uninews.unimelb.edu.au...

Originally posted by SpittinCobra
Question - In the matter of converting energy into matter, so far as
I've been able to find out, or rather to not find out, no experiment
exists in which energy is converted into matter with out the intermediary
of matter, e.g., fast moving particles.

One simple example of such process is beta plus decay, among many:

en.wikipedia.org...

In β+ decay, energy is used to convert a proton into a neutron, a positron (e+ ) and a neutrino

reply to post by buddhasystem


Sorry Buddhasystem, I should have made a footnote that this thread is from the archives originally dated 2003 or 4.

It is amazing how technology grows by leaps and bounds. What is now readily available to everyone from such sources as Wikipedia, just a couple of years ago was in theory.