Light and Matter (Origins)

by dhw, Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 16:26 (3628 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw (referring to an article in The Guardian about an experiment to make matter from "pure light"]: 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?
-DAVID: 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.-Thank you. What I'm trying to get my head round is the idea that "pure light", energy and matter are "interchangeable". I'm not making a case for anything, but am genuinely trying to understand a concept that has important implications for many of the theories we've been discussing, including those of your god and of panpsychism. Is there any form of light that is independent of matter? You and I have agreed on the concept of first cause energy, and I've been playing with the idea of energy eternally producing matter ... possibly resulting in universe after universe. But if we are to take light and energy as being synonymous and interchangeable with matter ... as stated above ... is there a chicken and egg situation, in so far as you can't have matter without energy, and you can't have energy without matter? This is a genuine question. As I said before, I'm out of my depth, but I can certainly do a bit of wading if you can explain the basics.