Hey everybody welcome back to explain my come five the podcast we take questions you always wanted to ask and talk about them in a way That's easy to understand where your hosts and Tim and I'm Kevin So Kevin today We're talking about a scientist that many five-year-olds may recognize and his name is Albert Einstein So Einstein's famous for a number of things, but none as much as the formula equals MC square Why is Einstein C equals MC square such a big deal such that everybody has heard about it How important was it really and why did Einstein get a Nobel prize for it? It's one of those days where you're really testing me and our listeners make sure we're on our toes, right? You are on your toes Kevin. That's good.
So the great Albert Einstein, you know Actually, he did not get the Nobel Prize for the famous E equals MC square Mm-hmm, but he did come up with it in the same year as he wanted Nobel Prize It all happened in 1905 and it's basically called Einstein's Year of Miracles If you can believe it in one year He published a series of papers that changed modern physics with at least three major breakthroughs The first one was about the particle theory of light and this is what won him his Nobel Prize The second led to people accepting the existence of atoms and a third is what introduced special relativity E equals MC squared And can you believe it? He was 26 years old that year? Okay, so we don't have time to explain all of Einstein's papers, but can we just explain E equals MC squared and why it is so important? Yeah, well, you could say it is the discovery that made possible things Ranging from the smartphone in your pocket to big things like modern power plants It came about because Einstein was trying to settle a debate in the scientific community Hugely important and the question is not asked enough.
So can we explain that on five? Oh well Tim I'll try my best So E equals MC squared. It's a formula that represents the relationship between energy and mass And in the years before this theory basically scientists thought that when two or more substances went or went a change You know, we call this a system the mass of all the inputs would equal the mass of all the outputs Basically stuff would not be magically created or destroyed But agreeing to this had scientists really differing on what the energy output of the system would be okay So energy had been thought of as mechanically separate and unrelated to mass. Yeah, that's right That's kind of the world that Isaac Newton assumed from the 1700s all the way into the early 1900s So what was the debate that Einstein was trying to settle?
Well in the years leading up to Einstein's discovery some scientists started realizing that if you give up on keeping mass the same Through some change you can use a similar principle to ensure the energy of the inputs It's actually match the energy output by the system I see so Einstein proposes in his paper that the relationship between energy and mass is a ratio where the energy of a system is equal To the mass times the speed of light sweat. Yes. Yes. Yes So if this is true then mass energy are basically the same thing but in different forms It also means that everything around you has a lot of pent up energy just by virtue of existing It's starting to look like big unstable atoms like uranium Well might have a lot of energy inside them So if you can find out how to convert one of those atoms into energy a very small thing can give you a lifetime of electricity And by extension of that a big explosion if released all at once now we get to atom bombs and nuclear bombs.
Yep Yep So long story short E m equals m c square gave us the bedrock for the last 100 years of Technological advancement nuclear power the ability to destroy the planet and some of the really cool tools for analyzing light Some people say that equals m c squared is even responsible for say smartphones. Why would that be the case? Oh, well equals m c square and general relativity Open up a whole body of work on quantum physics and there's a technique here called quantum tunneling used in micro circuitry Which basically allows for things like solid state memory and your flash drives and smartphone hard drives These devices they all use this quantum tunneling effect under certain conditions to manipulate where the electrons are and therefore where information is stored on a very very small level Now there is a story about how Albert Einstein learned algebra, which I thought was quite interesting. Oh, yeah, that's a really funny one So as a child Einstein's uncle Jacob introduced him to algebra and called it a merry science He compared algebra to hunting a little animal and you didn't know the name of the animal So you called it X and we finally caught the animal or discovered the right number You finally gave it the correct name.
Okay, so final one to end with when we think of Einstein We picture this old man with his tongue sticking out if all of these major discoveries were made when he was age 26 Why do we always remember him in that photo of himself in in his 70s? Oh, yes, the iconic Einstein sticking his tongue out photo was actually his annoyed reaction to paparazzi Who were all asking him to smile on his 72nd birthday It achieved cold status, you know mostly because Einstein himself asked for a crop version of that photo and it ordered many many prints and proceeded to send It to all his friends. Hmm. I see Did you learn something new if you did send us an email?
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