Re: The energy

[Michael Edmiston <edmiston@BLUFFTON.EDU>]

Prior to Rick Tarara's response (below) I was about ready to ask if
we've been watching too many movies like "The Matrix."  I guess I'll ask
that anyway.  And I also second John D's closing remark, that it
pointless to get too hung up on this.

I would like to make a few more comments about the idea of
inter-conversion and the idea of flow.  I understand the points Jim and
Leigh have made.  I don't argue, yet I do argue.  The problem is what
choice of words do we want to use to describe some of the things we see
(or think we see).

A photon is traveling in some region, and all of a sudden...  poof...
the photon is gone and in its place we see a positron and an electron.
We discover this is energy related because not any photon can do this.
The photon must have an energy of  at least 1.022 MeV which is the
E=mc^2 equivalent of the rest mass of the positron and the electron.

In a proton-rich nucleus it would be more energetically favorable if one
of the protons could become a neutron, and it will do this if it can
capture an orbital electron, in which case we have beta decay of the
electron-capture variety.  However, if the proton-rich nucleus has
enough energy (compared to the nucleus that would result from converting
a proton to a neutron), it doesn't need to wait for an orbit electron to
wander too close.  It can just make the electron by converting some of
its energy into pair production.  Of course the nucleus doesn't want the
positron, so it just spits it out, and we have beta-decay of the
positron-emission variety.

Oh my.  I have committed all kinds of heresy here.  I'm converting
energy to mass.  Electrons are wandering too close.  Nuclei want or
don't want things and spit things out.

I understand the need to be careful with our words.  But let's not get
to the point that we can no longer communicate.  Did my paragraphs about
pair production communicate the idea, or are they so flawed with
imperfect notions of physics that it would be better that I never said
them?

Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D.
Professor of Physics and Chemistry
Bluffton University
Bluffton, OH 45817
(419)-358-3270
edmiston@bluffton.edu



> Of course we now get metaphysical here.  If we really insist that both
> mass
> and energy are just inventions--mental abstractions--then it would
> seem so
> is the entire universe--ourselves included!  ;-)
>
> Rick