Light and Matter (Origins)

by dhw, Monday, May 19, 2014, 13:07 (3601 days ago)

An article in today's Guardian reports that scientists at Imperial College London expect to demonstrate within the next 12 months that matter can be made from "pure light". The matter will be in the form of "subatomic particles invisible to the naked eye". Oliver Pike, the lead researcher, said the process "was one of the most elegant demonstrations of Einstein's relationship that shows matter and energy are interchangeable currencies." Andrei Seryi, director of the John Adams Institute at Oxford University, said: "It's breathtaking to think that things we thought are not connected can in fact be converted to each other: matter and energy, particles and light."-The scientists will fire "electrons at a slab of gold to produce a beam of high-energy photons. Next, they fire a high-energy laser into a tiny gold capsule called a hohlraum, from the German for "empty room".*** This produces light as bright as that emitted from stars. In the final stage, they send the first beam of photons into the hohlraum where the two streams of photons collide. [...] 
"You might call it the most dramatic consequence of QED [quantum electrodynamics] and it clearly shows that light and matter are interchangeable."-*** This is a mistranslation - it means empty space.-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?


Complete thread:

 RSS Feed of thread

powered by my little forum