Light and Matter (Origins)

by David Turell , Monday, May 19, 2014, 15:53 (3629 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: An article in today's Guardian reports that scientists at Imperial > "You might call it the most dramatic consequence of QED [/i][quantum electrodynamics] and it clearly shows that light and matter are interchangeable."
> Was it BBella who suggested that light might prove to be the ultimate source of all things? However, although I realize that light is a form of energy, I don't quite understand how this experiment proves that matter can be made from "pure light", when the production of the light itself and of the matter seems to require a massive input of a different form of energy. The scientists appear to be using the terms "light" and "energy" as if they were synonyms. I'm out of my depth here, so perhaps someone could "enlighten" me?-Read the article more carefully. The answer is there:-"The original idea was written down by two US physicists, Gregory Breit and John Wheeler, in 1934. They worked out that ... very rarely ... two particles of light, or photons, could combine to produce an electron and its antimatter equivalent, a positron. Electrons are particles of matter that form the outer shells of atoms in the everyday objects around us."-Photons are part of several matter particles as this paragraph illustrates, and in many quantum processes photons are given off by those particles. This is just reversing the process. By the way John Wheeler is one of the giants of early theoretical quantum mechanics, along with Feynman, etc.