The problem is that E=mc2 does not meaning anythimg that makes sense. Anyone is welcome to try to explain it here. Eating a pound of cake does not cause one's energy to increase by the speed of light squared.
103 comments
(EDIT: forgot username :D, Toby)
Um... just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean it doesn't make sense. To me, a² = b² + c² didn't make any sense until I heard 10 explanations, but now I get it just fine.
But, then again, you are Andy Schlafly. I just hope you never get any serious influence on anything that matters even remotely on a larger-scale basis.
Oh, and Andy... please, shut up. The grown-ups are trying to do physics.
The half-sentence, 'does not meaning anythimg that makes sense,' pretty much sums up why you shouldn't be commenting on things like this, Schlafly.
Eating a pound of cake does not cause one's energy to increase by the speed of light squared.
Well, first off you need to define the constant C at your reference point. And what is the mass of the cake anyway?
Define your variables. Then we can talk about how wrong you are with the rest of the calculation.
/redpen
I love how 99% of the commenters on the page are trying to talk sense into him, only to be met with a wall of incredible obtuseness. It's astounding how someone like Schlafly can maintain his idiocy in the face of not only liberal atheists, but other conservative Christians as well (his "conservative Bible" project didn't go over well at all with them) and his own physicist brother. If mule-headedness was a superpower, he would be unbeatable.
Anyone is welcome to try to explain it here.
Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Hundreds of above ground, under water and under ground tests.
All of these prove that E=mc2 is correct.
Fail on a nuclear scale.
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I can't understand it, therefore it's false! Which is why Andy thinks that most things are false.
This level of stupidity is to be expected from someone who thinks that the theory of relativity is a liberal plot to get more people to have abortions.
"Eating a pound of cake does not cause one's energy to increase by the speed of light squared."
By one pound times the speed of light squared, yes it does. You are one pound more massive after eating the cake, so you have one pound times c squared more total energy.
Sadly, unless you are Captain Atom, you can only ever access the tiniest fraction of all that energy.
I didn't know we had nuclear fission reactors in our stomachs. I thought we just digested the food and got whatever energy and nutrients we can and crapped out the rest (which still has enough nutrients and energy to fertilize plants). I hadn't realized that our stomachs could split every atom in a pound of cake. But wait, if we could do that why would we need to eat so much food? A spoonful of sugar should be able to power us for months.
Andy is proving his own theorem:
One can never truly reach total dumbass. A master, such as Andy, can always say something twice as dumb as his last statement.
"The problem is that E=mc2 does not meaning anythimg that makes sense. Anyone is welcome to try to explain it here. Eating a pound of cake does not cause one's energy to increase by the speed of light squared."
And yet you managed an engineering degree, did you? In what field, Tinker Toys? Certainly it wasn't anything involving mathematics or physics.
You fail at physics, math,.... Oh, fer crying out loud, you fail everything.
I don't know about you, but I usually either keep quiet when I don't understand what people are talking about, or ask them politely for an explanation, which I then try my best to understand.
Stating loudly that "It doesn't make sense because I don't understand it" is not a wise move, if you want to be seen to have average intelligence, ya know.
If you divide an atom in half the energy released is equal to the mass of the atom times the speed of light, squared. If you don't believe this is possible, then you probably didn't live in Hiroshima or Nagasaki in 1945.
Now come now Andy, it's one thing you show complete incredulity on scientific topics that are abstract and hard to see in our daily lives. But this one is pretty demonstrable.
OK, let's flip your argument:
How many pounds of cake would it take to equal the destructive capacity of 13 kilotons of TNT?
Andy, Andy, Andy, when a person eats cake it reacts chemically in the body, not nuclear. But why am I botherin?. Anyone as wantonly stupid as you doesn't care about explanations.
I don't think Sheldon would bother to address this level of fail, and nor should anyone else, to quote Wolfgang Pauli, Andy is not even wrong.
Eating a pound of cake does not cause one's energy to increase by the speed of light squared.
In Andy's case, energy must be decreased , because his pound of cake gets converted into a ton of bull$hit!
What? I mean, just WTF? I think we have a new contender for most ignorant statement of the year.
What's next? A fundie declaration that germs don't cause disease? Schlafly, I didn't think even you were this dumb.
Mr Schlafly, being unable to understand a scientific equation does not mean that it does not make sense.
To answer what Aschlafly obviously views as a hard question:
Assuming I were the editor of a leading mainstream scientific journal, would I publish a well-written paper criticizing relativity?
Answer: I'd make it the cover article.
U-Th-Pb. The mass of uranium-the mass of particles given off during its decay =/= the mass of lead it decays into. Why? Some is lost to energy, see Einstein's equation. That's why a small amount of nuclear fuel has so much energy. Oh, never mind. Freshman physics is beyond you.
Sigh. This is what happens when your mom spends your childhood out telling other women they should be home taking care of their kids - instead of staying home and taking care of her kid.
To quote Mr. T - I pity da fool.
The problem is that E=mc2 does not meaning anythimg that makes sense.
Fortunately, the rest of human race who need PET scans aren't dependent on ignorant people like you.
If you put an electron and a positron together, they annihilate each other and turn into two or more gamma rays whose energy equals the mass of the electrons according to Einstein's formula plus the kinetic energy (momentum) of the electrons as they collide. The mass of the electron and positron disappear (photons have no rest mass) and the mass is converted to pure light energy.
You know I can get someone being willfully ignorant enough to where they can pretend they don't understand evolution, I really can. It's a theory that doesn't see much practical application in everyday use and most of what it describes exists beyond the scope of the human experience. But denying Einstein's equation for nuclear energy goes beyond willful ignorance and into the realm of clinical insanity.
First of all you would have to deny the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because the nuclear bombs dropped on them would not have been possible without E=MC2. Then you would have to deny the 40 years of paranoia that America experienced over Russians having nuclear weapons, which Andy Schlafly grew up with. Today he would have to deny the current made up paranoia over Iran building nuclear weapons as well as the real paranoia over North Korea building them as well. Why last year he would have had to have not watched any major news network or else he would have seen that story about the Fukishima nuclear power plant nearly melting down.
"The problem is that E=mc2 does not meaning anythimg that makes sense."
No, the problem is that you think you're qualified to make that judgement.
"Eating a pound of cake does not cause one's energy to increase by the speed of light squared."
True, but utterly irrelevant.
"The problem is that E=mc2 does not meaning anythimg that makes sense."
Oh Andy, you're priceless.
"I have an equation of sorts of my own: Albert Einstein > Andy Schlafly."
That's not an equation; that's an inequality. :P
@ Agahnim
Andy, that formula is for converting mass into energy.
You eating a cake turns exactly no mass into energy. Any energy you gain is through chemistry, not nuclear physics, you incredible retard.
Since atomic energy and the atomic bomb work Schlafly obviously is wrong. But lets go through the basics shall we for poor Andy.
The basic equation is E=M or Energy equals Mass. Since that is a basic physical principle that Energy and Mass are different forms of the fundamental building blocks of the Universe it is obvious that E=M. This also goes with the principle that energy is nether lost nor destroyed but simply changes form. c is the speed of light, because you now "light" tends to move at that speed. (Light in this case includes visible and invisible, to us, light.) the 2 is the squared property of that which happens when you release the potential energy of a given amount of Mass. Thus the equation is that a given amount of mass times the speed of light times itself equals a truly large amount of energy.
Now Andy I'm no physics geek yet I knew this. Now why don't you go and learn before you spout off.
Eating a pound of cake does not cause one's energy to increase by the speed of light squared.
No, because you would need that fission thingie first. Last time I checked, stomach =/= nuclear reactor.
If only Andy had been around when Einstein was working, he could've pointed out to him all his errors. "Gott in Himmel, vot vos I thinking! That verdammte Schlafly is right! Vy didn't I think of eating cake to test ze hypothesis!"
Andy doesn't understand the difference between chemical and nuclear reactions.
The energy derived from a piece of cake is gained by pushing electrons around via nuclear reactions. Exactly no mass is converted into energy.
The energy derived from a pound of uranium is derived from atomic nuclei breaking into smaller fragments. During the fragmentation process, some of the mass of the fragments is turned into energy. The equation E=mc^2 describes the quantitative relationship between energy and mass--to wit, a very small amount of mass makes a very large amount of energy.
But then, Andy thinks that moral relativism is somehow connected to the theory of relativity, so explaining the difference is useless. I wonder if he has the same problem some Objectivists have with quantum mechanics and causality?
If you ate a pound of antimatter cake your energy would increase by a pound times the speed of light squared.
In fact, since the pound of antimatter in the cake would annihilate a pound of normal matter in your body, the total amount of energy liberated would be TWO pounds times the speed of light squared.
I wholeheartedly encourage you to try this experiment, Andy. I'll even supply the antimatter.
@ Shax : You wrote:
"The energy derived from a piece of cake is gained by pushing electrons around via nuclear reactions. Exactly no mass is converted into energy." Assuming you're talking about the energy dreived from metabolizing the cake, chemically, inside the eater's body -- I have to disagree with you there.
A VERY VERY SMALL amount of matter is converted into energy, even during an ordinary chemical reaction. The electron configurations in the CO2 and water that come out of metabolizing the cake have a teeny teeny tiny bit less mass than the electron configurations in the cake and oxygen that went in. (The electrons are orbiting the nuclei slightly more slowly, and thus have slightly less relativistic mass.)
The difference is on the order of 0.000000000001% .
@tracer: okay, I stand corrected. My chem professors in college said as much, so I really should have been more precise.
And like you, they also said that the difference in mass was so miniscule that it barely even existed, and in most chemical reactions the lost mass was all but impossible to measure. But nevertheless, a very, very, very, very tiny bit of mass WAS converted into energy every time a chemical reaction took place. From that standpoint, ultimately all reactions are fundamentally nuclear reactions.
But there again, we're talking about Shaftfly here. Since he doesn't seem to understand the difference between chemical and nuclear reactions and regularly rants, bitches and screams about the liberal anti-Christian bias of basic math, he's not going to be able to comprehend the difference anyway.
It makes sense to me, Andy, but I'm not a fuckwitted retard pretending to be a science teacher. I actually have an understanding of physics.
Andy, Einstein was one of the smartest men who ever lived. You, on the other hand, are a non-entity whose blog is regarded as a joke even by most conservatives.
You insipid idiot. What otherworldly narcotics are you on? The eqiation has survived decades of scientific scrutinity, you heven't survived a single moment of such. Get yourself a scoence degree, learn something, pry open that calcified object you call a brain, and then return with you mindless false.equivalencies.
A physicist.
According to Wiki, this imbecile is a lawyer! Can this be true?
And why would the formula be ungodly anyway?
I don't understand it, either, but that doesn't mean it makes no sense. It only means that it is too complicated for my brain, but at least I freely admit it.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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