Dennis Whyte

It's very difficult to know.

But probably profound, yeah.

We've done a pretty good job of that over the course of our histories.

So it has to do with everything we do.

It's the fact that energy and mass are equivalent to each other.

The way we usually comment to it is that they're just energy, just in different forms.

Yes, but it takes a long time.

I teach the introductory class for incoming nuclear engineers.

And so we put this up as an equation and we go through many iterations of using this.

how you derive it, how you use it, and so forth.

And then usually in the final exam, I would basically take all the equations that I've used before and I flip it around.

I basically, instead of thinking about energy is equal to mass, it's sort of mass is equal to energy.

And I ask the question in a different way

And usually about half the students don't get it.

It takes a while to get that intuition.

So in the end, it's interesting is that this is actually the source of all free energy because that energy that we're talking about is kinetic energy if it can be transformed from mass.

So it turns out even...

Even though we used equals MC squared, this is burning coal and burning gas and burning wood is actually still equals MC squared.

The problem is that you would never know this because the relative change in the mass is incredibly small.

By the way, which comes back to fusion, which is that...