Infinity.

[GQ Chris]

To fully understand Infinity, you must be Infinity. You must be God.


*brain explodes*

 

[Cabal]

I never did resolve it, and I'm in my late 30's.
Ever since I was in my early teens, I always wondered how the E=MC2 in fission played out. I was told that fission was an E=MC2 process, and was also told that this meant the mass of the particles involved (including subatomic ones) turned into energy thru this E=MC2 process.
That necessarily meant that the mass of the particles that will turn into energy has to go to infinity.
The sources I read never explained how that was so. I figured that there was some kind of localized condition that was met that propelled thru acceleration the mass that would ultimately reached infinity. Since this condition was localized on the quantum level I thought, then this infinite mass would never see its effect seen outside its locality, which would be the size of the uranium atom itself.

This is as far as I went with the idea until I started this Infinity thread on CF...

Still not sure if the process of mass-energy conversion would involve an infinity though (not like I actually pretend to even remotely know what the current thinking on how this conversion happens, but anyway...)

I still think you're trying to apply the Lorentz factor to stuff that it doesn't apply to, i.e photons. For mass to go to energy, its speed should (according to you) go to c. But it needn't necessarily (via the Lorentz factor, anyway), as the model doesn't apply to massless particles. It seems to me like you're trying to make the physics explain the model, rather than the model explain the physics.

 

[Holy Roller]

Still not sure if the process of mass-energy conversion would involve an infinity though (not like I actually pretend to even remotely know what the current thinking on how this conversion happens, but anyway...)

I still think you're trying to apply the Lorentz factor to stuff that it doesn't apply to, i.e photons. For mass to go to energy, its speed should (according to you) go to c. But it needn't necessarily (via the Lorentz factor, anyway), as the model doesn't apply to massless particles. It seems to me like you're trying to make the physics explain the model, rather than the model explain the physics.

The guys at PF are now beginning to suggest there's no difference between combustion and fission from a mass-energy conversion standpoint; but we'll see how this plays out.

 

[Holy Roller]

To fully understand Infinity, you must be Infinity. You must be God.

I actually wanted this thread to take that metaphysical direction early on, GQ Chris...

 

[necroforest]

To generalise necroforest's last point: some infinities are larger than others. There are an infinite number of positive integers, and there are an infinite number of negative integers. But the number of integers (positive, negative, and other) is larger still, and is infinite. Thus, the former infinities are smaller than the latter infinity. Confusing? It should be: it drove Georg Cantor mad (allegedly...).

This is incorrect. The cardinality (the technical term for "number of things in a set" or "size of a set") for Z, the set of integers (...,-1,0,1,...) is the same as the cardinality of N, the set of natural numbers (1, 2, 3, ...). So, there's the same number of positive integers as there is positive and negative integers combined! Cool, huh?

In fact, the set Q of rational numbers (a rational number is a number that can be expressed as a/b, where a and b are integers and b is not zero) is also the same size as N (and Z).

However, the set R of real numbers (numbers that can be written with an infinite decimal expansion, i.e pi and sqrt(2)) is larger than N (and Z (and Q)).

All of these results are surprisingly easy to prove, as well.

 

[[serious]]

I never did resolve it, and I'm in my late 30's.
Ever since I was in my early teens, I always wondered how the E=MC2 in fission played out. I was told that fission was an E=MC2 process, and was also told that this meant the mass of the particles involved (including subatomic ones) turned into energy thru this E=MC2 process.
That necessarily meant that the mass of the particles that will turn into energy has to go to infinity.
The sources I read never explained how that was so. I figured that there was some kind of localized condition that was met that propelled thru acceleration the mass that would ultimately reached infinity. Since this condition was localized on the quantum level I thought, then this infinite mass would never see its effect seen outside its locality, which would be the size of the uranium atom itself.

This is as far as I went with the idea until I started this Infinity thread on CF...

I think I see your confusion a bit better now. Really, all E=MC^2 means is that mass is a form of energy. Specifically, 1 Kg of mass (any mass) is equal to 90,000,000,000,000,000 (90 quadrillion) joules of energy. When you deal with rather routine releases of energy like combustion, we are dealing with such minute changes in mass that we can safely ignore it. In fact, even nukes are very low yield. Matter/antimatter interactions on the other hand can occur with 100% efficiency. At any point of the interaction the total energy of the system remains the same. It's just that some of the energy stored as mass gets converted to photons. Mass can't be created unless you have some input of energy sufficient to create that much mass. This is true both for mass increase due to acceleration and direct mass creation from the interaction of high energy photons.

Any clearer?