One of the most fascinating implications of Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2 is that matter and energy are interchangeable.
Now, a team of scientists from Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York has reported the first direct observation of matter creation from light in a single step. They used the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a powerful particle accelerator that can smash together heavy ions at nearly the speed of light.
By doing so, they created intense electromagnetic fields that contained virtual photons, which are short-lived disturbances in the fields that behave like real photons.
Light is the source of all life, for millennia our ancestors knew this in their hearts, they worshipped the very sun that kept the evils of the dark at bay. Our species have derived theologies and mythologies on this very concept.
The segregation of light and matter has been integral to those beliefs, but what if we could produce light in a lab?
Would that disprove the very theories we have come to believe as fact? Well… what if we could create matter from light itself? Would that change anything at all? What if, I told you, we have already done it?
