What is the relationship between matter and energy ?

What is the relationship between matter and energy ?

Matter and Energy are two inseparable opposites, capable of transforming into one another and yet opposites of one another. This contradiction is expressed in the fact that matter is linked to order and energy to disorder, in the fact that matter is linked to the laws of fermions and energy to the laws of bosons, two systems with opposing laws, in the fact that matter is linked to discontinuity and energy to apparent continuity, in the fact that energy is linked to the void and matter to the apparent non-void. We find these oppositions in wave/corpuscle or continuous/discontinuous… In fact, these opposites are not diametrical and the matter-energy link is unthinkable without dialectics !!! It is enough for matter to emit or absorb light for matter and energy to apparently exchange. I say apparently because it is the construction of the expressions "matter" and "light" as separate objects that is false. Matter does not exist without light and light does not exist without the ephemeral matter of the void...

For a long time, theories have tried to unify the two by excluding one of the two terms ! For some, everything was matter, for others everything was energy or form ! But this method did not succeed in describing the laws of Physics and it was necessary to give up on removing one of the opposites !

Certainly, matter has inert mass and radiation does not, but light does have mass and its path is curved ^by the presence of mass, which means that energy has relativistic mass.

In fact, the dialectical duo energy-matter corresponds to another duo of the same type which is matter-antimatter.

If the two collide, the matter disappears and is transformed entirely into energy. This is the only known situation where the entire mass of matter is transformed into energy.

Matter-antimatter annihilation produces gamma radiation, i.e., very high-energy radiation. But this energy does not remain in this form and instead produces a matter/antimatter pair, i.e., lepton/antilepton (muon/antimuon, for example) or quark/antiquark (k meson, for example), which then produce many other things. This is what physicists routinely achieve in their high-energy electron/positron colliders.

In fact, energy is nothing other than the matter-antimatter couple. It is still a dialectical couple. Even if many physicists are unaware of it, what they write is dialectics ! We can read here "This reaction gives an unexpected meaning to the prefix "anti", which did not mean "destructive" as many people might have imagined but was more equivalent to "opposite".

The basis of the relationship between matter and energy is based on quantum principles through the exchange of a virtual fermion : since energy is based on virtual fermion/antifermion pairs, the real fermion that comes into contact is exchanged with the virtual fermion, the Higgs boson causing the property of "real matter with inert mass" to jump from one fermion to the other. This is how the energy fermion was transformed into a real matter fermion. The pairs of opposites are exchanged, and the contradiction is maintained along the way.

Matter can even less be considered separately from energy since these virtual fermion/antifermion couples constantly surround the real particle with a cloud of polarization which is permanently located around the corpuscle and determines its wave-like character at the same time. Here again the contradiction is dialectical ! And no other philosophy is an interpretation of what we observe : oppositions which do not destroy each other but constantly change participants and sometimes form.

It is therefore the basic mechanism of matter which makes it a whole with energy, even if the latter sometimes has appearances completely opposed to those of matter.

The fact that matter can be transformed into energy and vice versa definitively shows that the contradiction is indeed dialectical...

Note that the interdependence of matter and energy is manifested in the fact that every matter-matter relationship involves energy exchanges, particularly via photons. Without energy, there is therefore no matter-matter relationship possible.

On the other hand, it is the polarization cloud that surrounds the matter particle, composed as we have said of virtual particle-antiparticle couples and therefore of quantum vacuum energy, which prevents two matters from approaching each other to the point of merging, which therefore prevents matter from colliding into a point. An essential property of matter, the matter-matter repulsion at short distances, is therefore produced by energy !

The closer two matters get, the more energy there is between them to repel them. This fundamental property is manifested in a thousand ways in quantum physics, notably by the Heisenberg inequalities which express nothing else. And also by the Pauli principle which expresses this matter-matter repulsion at short distance. It is a property par excellence quantum and inexplicable by classical physics but many physicists are unaware that it is also a dialectical property : it is the opposite of matter which directs matter and the closer matters get, the more they repel each other by means of energy !

The entire probabilistic character of quantum physics is included and interpreted in these fundamental properties and it is essential to emphasize that these properties are indeed both quantum and dialectical.

Yes, Hegel was right : nature leaps forward, nature is based on interpenetrating and exchanging opposites, it passes from one contradiction to another and opposites are interdependent and constructive at the same time as destructive !

Dialectical leaps are the key to the material dynamics that produce not only physical laws but also the change of these, the formation of new structures... Hegel would not have been surprised !

One form of this matter-energy dialectic is the opposition between virtual matter and real matter, based on the opposition between matter and antimatter, and also on the opposition between positive and negative electric charges. And there are still others, such as the dialectical opposition between the virtual of the quantum vacuum and the underlying state called the virtual of virtual !

If quantum physics has seemed so astounding, not only for classical physics but also for ordinary thought and classical philosophy, it is because physicists, like many authors, scientists or not, most often do not know the first word of Hegel’s dialectical philosophy... And, even today, no one thinks of teaching it to apprentice physicists, quite wrongly as we see ! So much so that, like Molière’s bourgeois gentleman "writes prose without knowing it", scientists write dialectics without knowing it. And, of course, it bothers them extraordinarily to ignore it in order to understand it !!!

The fundamental contradiction for matter-energy is that of the quantum vacuum itself, notably between virtual and virtual of virtual, and it has allowed it to found the other physical dynamics, that is to say at the same time the dialectical contradictions void-matter, void-light and matter-light. As we see the dialectical remark is in no way incidental to understanding modern physics !

Thus, for many physicists, either a particle is electrically charged in a positive way or it is in a negative way. This is to ignore that, thanks to the polarization cloud made up of particle-antiparticle couples which surrounds the charged particle by orienting itself according to this charge, forms successively negative and positive layers which "screen" the charge of the so-called real inert mass particle. This means that, for a charged matter particle which approaches more and more, the other charged particle is successively positive and negative, and is constantly transforming from negative particle to positive particle !!! Yes, all opposites are constantly exchanged : attraction into repulsion, charge into its opposite, corpuscle into wave, etc.

Where does energy come from ?

Yes, but what energy ? For example, the one we consume ? Well, some will say, but we produce it in our factories, in our nuclear and thermal power plants, in our electrical installations, in our battery manufacturing plants, right ?

But human society could not produce energy if natural mechanisms did not produce it ! Humans have not invented any energy that is not natural and they are far from being able to exploit most of the energy produced by nature. The fraction of natural energy that is used by humans is less than 1% !!!

Before our eyes, the Sun produces a crazy amount of energy every day, some of which reaches Earth or the atmosphere, and the radioactive center of the Earth also produces a considerable amount that humans are unable to exploit at the moment. The clouds, the seas, the oceans are also full of crazy energy, none of which is of use to humans.

Light is energy, you might say, and matter is the source of energy, right ?

Well, that is precisely what we want to discuss in this text.

We thus remember the “E = mc²” of Einstein’s Relativity which indicates the equivalence between mass and energy.

We also notice how immense this energy is since we have to multiply the mass by the speed of light and then a second time by the speed of light which is enormous...

A very small part of this enormous energy contained in matter dissipates through radioactivity, when a very small piece of matter disappears, transforming entirely into radiation, into energy.

Because energy is radiation !

Light, radioactivity, electromagnetism in general, but also the carriers of the strong and weak nuclear force, are energy.

The photon, the gluon, the W and Z particles, the interaction particles, the bosons in general, these are quantum carriers of energy.

What is the relationship between quanta and energy ?

Well, there is only one quanta. It always has the same value, but it is not energy ! It is a product of energy and time. The shorter the time, the greater the energy, which allows the quanta to always have the same value of a quantity called "action."

However, the question asked was ’where does the energy come from’ and not just where it resides...

“Where does it come from” is a question about the origin…

We can therefore think that the energy of the Universe would come from a Big Bang...

But the suns, the physical phenomena show that energy did not only occur billions of years ago but also before our eyes.

Here, for example, is how energy is produced in stars, these suns

This is also how energy is produced in the center of the Earth, in its core

Radioactive energy is primarily natural and not produced by humans in power plants : see here

But natural phenomena as simple as waves or clouds also produce an incredible amount of energy !

In fact, is energy really "produced" before our eyes or is it only "transformed" according to the laws of thermodynamics ? Is it not only passages between quantities of mechanical, calorific, chemical, electrical, magnetic, luminous, nuclear energy, with conservation and not production of energy ?

As far as matter and light are concerned, it is true that energy is not lost and new energy is not produced, it is only conserved and changes form.

Let us recall that Thermodynamics further states that energy, by changing form, changes quality and that these changes can be irreversible.

This means that any quality of energy can be transformed into heat, but the reverse is not true.

Heat is apparently the most disordered energy, and therefore, we cannot completely transform heat into mechanical or electromagnetic energy, for example. Of course, the example of thermal power plants shows that some heat can still be transformed into mechanical or electromagnetic energy.

What does "quality" have to do with this matter of the origin of energy which really seemed to be purely quantitative ?

Energy is always, at some level, a question of agitation. Now, what can be agitated, shocked, and shocked by the rest of the world are material objects, molecules, atoms, particles, all sorts of corpuscles and groups of material corpuscles that exist at various scales of the material universe. Because this universe of matter is organized hierarchically with various levels.

It is known that the level we are at, called macroscopic, is not identical to the level of molecules and living cells, the microscopic level, nor to the level of particles like the electron, the quantum level (the atom is already at the level of one hundred millionth of a centimeter, the nucleus, the proton and the electron go down even further !). It is less known that there are, even below, two hierarchical levels of matter that contain the same material particles but in an increasingly ephemeral and agitated way, these are levels of the quantum vacuum called "the virtual" and "the virtual of virtual", levels that disappear too quickly for any of our devices (which are at the macroscopic scale) to be able to measure directly.

However, it is still matter that we find in the quantum vacuum. And this matter produces shocks, interactions, and for this it needs interaction corpuscles, therefore energy.

Vacuum energy is also carried by corpuscles at the so-called "virtual" level (a term that does not mean that they do not actually exist). These are the same as at the so-called "real" quantum level, but they are not durable.

Virtual bosons all exist, like the virtual photon or the virtual gluon.

And the most remarkable thing is what we are going to say now : all the energy, including that of lasting matter and lasting light, of the "real" universe, all this energy of the Universe comes from the quantum vacuum !!!!

Where does energy come from ? It always and everywhere comes from the void !

Matter and light, durable corpuscles, called real, are all based on structures of the void which require the energy of the void to develop all their properties.

Let’s take an extremely common and simple phenomenon to demonstrate this…

An electric current flows through a conductor—there’s no more basic experience than this. Well, the energy that allows the current to flow… comes from the quantum vacuum ! Yes, indeed !

How to prove it ?

As everyone knows, the laws that govern this phenomenon are those of Maxwell. From these laws, a mathematical tool has been deduced that allows us to know where the energy comes from, how it enters, how it leaves, in which direction and in which sense : this is what we call the "Poynting vector" from the name of the person who carried out this calculation taken from Maxwell. A vector is precisely a mathematical tool, at the same time numerical, directed and oriented. It allows us to know at any point, how the energy moves, by how much, in which direction and in which sense.

Now the calculation of the Poynting vector S, carried out with regard to the electric current passing in an electric conductor, is very telling : the vector is perpendicular to the conductor and directed towards the conductor.

Towards the conductor, this means that the energy goes to the conductor and comes from where ?

Well, it comes from the… void !!!!!

This means that the passage of current through the conductor modifies the quantum vacuum, structures it and makes it capable of continuously supplying energy to the conductor !!!

In short, the entire conductor and the space around it do not change energy but there is a transfer from the vacuum to the conductor...

Feynman puts the question in his "Course in Physics" (electromagnetism 2) :

“It is clear that the energy of matter is not conserved. When an object radiates light, it loses energy. However, the lost energy can be described in another form, for example, as light. Therefore, the theory of conservation of energy is incomplete without considering the energy associated with light, or more generally, with the electromagnetic field. We will now deal with the law of conservation of energy and also with the momentum of fields. Of course, we cannot deal with one without the other, since in the theory of relativity they are two aspects of the same four-vector (four-dimensional vector).

At the very beginning of Volume I we talked about the conservation of energy, we said there, only, that the total energy of the universe was constant. We now want to extend the idea of ​​the law of conservation of energy in an important way – in a way that tells us in detail “how” energy is conserved. This new law will tell us that if energy escapes from a region, it is because it “flows” across the boundaries of that region. This is a somewhat stronger law than the conservation of energy without such a restriction…

The idea is to assume that there is an energy density u and a flux S which depend only on the fields E and B (electric and magnetic)…

The calculation gives :

u = epsilon zero over 2 times E times E + epsilon zero times c² over 2 times B times B

S = epsilon zero times c² times E times B

Or

c = speed of light

epsilon zero = permittivity of vacuum

This new vector S is the "Poynting vector," named after its discoverer. It tells us the speed at which the field’s energy moves through space...

Let’s take an example. Consider the flow of energy in a capacitor that we are slowly charging... When the capacitor charges, the volume between the plates receives the energy... There must be a flow of energy entering this volume from somewhere. Obviously, you think, it must come in through the charging wires.

Well, not at all !

It cannot cross the space between the armatures in this direction, because the electric field vector E is perpendicular to the armatures ; E x B (product of two vectors) must be parallel to the armatures.

You remember, of course, that during the charging of the capacitor there is a magnetic field whose field lines are circles centered on the axis… There is therefore an energy flux proportional to E x B which penetrates all around through the edges of the capacitor…

The energy is not actually supplied by the wires but comes from the space surrounding the capacitor...

How is this possible ? It’s not an easy question, but here’s one way to think about it. Suppose there are charges above and below the capacitor, very far away. When the charges are very far away, there is a weak but very extensive field all around the capacitor. Then, as the charges get closer, the field becomes stronger near the capacitor. So the field energy that’s outside moves into the capacitor, and eventually stops between the plates.

As another example, let’s look at what happens in a piece of resistance carrying a current. Since the wire has resistance, there is an electric field along the wire, which produces the current. Since there is a potential drop along the wire, there is also an electric field outside and very close to the wire, parallel to its surface. There is also a magnetic field that rotates around the wire, due to the current. The vectors E and B (electric and magnetic) are perpendicular ; therefore the Poynting vector (derived from the vector product E x B) is radial and directed inwards. There is a flow of energy entering the wire all around. This is equal to the energy dissipated in the wire in the form of heat.

So our "crazy" theory says that the electrons get their energy to produce heat because there is a flow of energy into the wire from the external field.

Our intuition suggested instead that the electrons receive their energy from their movement along the wire, and therefore, energy should flow along the wire.

But the theory says that electrons are actually pushed by an electric field due to very distant charges, and that they acquire their energy to generate heat from these fields.

Energy flows in a certain way, from distant charges across a vast region of space, then into the interior of the wire…

You are probably beginning to feel that Poynting’s theory at least partially violates your intuition about the location of energy in an electromagnetic field… It is clear that our current intuitions are quite wrong.

When Feynman explains that the energy comes from the field or from space and goes to the conducting wire or to the capacitor that is being charged, it is clear that this means that it is produced by... the quantum vacuum !!!!

Let us remember that the quantum vacuum is made up of particles and antiparticles of ephemeral matter that form the entire world, both the vacuum and also lasting matter and light.

Particles and antiparticles are ephemeral in the void but, when they do not disappear, are coupled.

All kinds of particles, and there are a great many of them, hundreds, not limited to the most well-known ones like electrons, protons and neutrons, exist in ephemeral, virtual form.

So these ephemeral particles exist and move in pairs within the quantum vacuum, then disappear to transform into energy and this transformation creates a permanent energetic agitation in the vacuum.

The vacuum constantly produces energy which it supplies to matter and light, and without which these could not exist.

The mere existence of the durability property of "real" matter particles comes from the fact that they have received a boson (= energy-carrying particle) called Higgs !!!

Light itself is based on the particles and antiparticles of the vacuum that it couples, a photon being equivalent for example to an electron-antielectron couple.

All interactions between atoms or material particles take place through the particles and antiparticles of the quantum vacuum and through photons which are particle-antiparticle pairs.

It therefore takes at least 1 MeV of energy to create an electron-positron pair in a vacuum (the positron being the antiparticle of the electron).

The astrophysicist Cassé writes in "On the Void and Creation" : "At the center of the cloud of the virtual is still a virtual, of a higher order. And these doubly virtual electrons and positrons surround themselves with their own cloud of virtual corpuscles, and this ad infinitum. (…) The resulting quantum image is an electron (…) protected by successive ranks of virtual photons (…) The electron is no longer the simple being it was. (…) It is clothed in fluctuating void. Similarly, each proton is depicted as a concentric microcosm where the different levels of virtuality are arranged. At the center is the real particle, its close guard is made up of the most massive (energetic) and therefore the most ephemeral particles and antiparticles, W and Z bosons, proton-antiproton pairs and gamma photons. The second circle contains the positron-electron pairs and the photons of about 1 MeV. At the periphery float the photons of declining energy. Each virtual particle, as before, surrounds itself with its virtual cosmos and each in turn does the same indefinitely. The vacuum consists of a virtual cloud floating randomly. The frenetic activity around the smallest electron, the smallest proton, takes us forever away from the peaceful image that most philosophers attribute to the word "vacuum."

“At the Heart of Matter” by Maurice Jacob :

“The shorter the observation time, the higher the possible energy fluctuations. Since Planck’s constant has a practically zero value when expressed using units of time and energy specific to the human scale, these quantum fluctuations are invisible on our scale, but this is no longer the case for units of time and energy on the scale of particle physics. Quantum fluctuations become omnipresent… If the observation time is of the order of ten to the power of minus twenty-one seconds, a fluctuation of 1 MeV is very likely. We can therefore find an electron-positron pair appearing from nothing and then vanishing because its mass energy is indeed of the order of 1 MeV. If the observation time allowed is now only of the order of ten to the power of minus twenty-four seconds, the vacuum seems to be bubbling with a large number of electron-positron pairs constantly forming and annihilating each other, absorbing or giving off photons, but pions, as if the strong interactions had also awakened. It only takes 300 MeV to create a globally neutral pion pair, one pi plus and one pi minus, and with a time scale of ten to the power of minus twenty-four seconds, an energy fluctuation of the order of 1 GeV is highly probable. Let us go down by a factor of two in the permitted time interval. We see the appearance of proton-antiproton pairs. Let us go up to ten to the power of minus twenty-six seconds and W and Z pairs appear. The weak interactions are now in full swing. We see that, even if everything seems strangely calm on a human scale, all of physics is present in the vacuum. It keeps in memory all the laws of physics so that we can say figuratively that this nothingness contains being in a potential way…
So we arrive at this conclusion : energy is carried by ephemeral particle-antiparticle pairs of the void…”

Why only emptiness ?

Well, it is only in a vacuum that we find antiparticles and ephemeral particles.

Who are these particle-antiparticle pairs ? Well, they are the photon, the W and Z particles for example, or the gluon or any interacting particle...

The energy of the Universe therefore comes exclusively from the quantum vacuum which is also the foundation of matter and light and their energy as well as their properties.

The fact that energy is carried by ephemeral particle-antiparticle couples explains its quantum character. Indeed, the shorter the lifetime of the couple, the more energy it will carry, so that the energy-time product is always equal to one Planck quanta h.

The nature of energy is therefore directly linked to the quantum nature of the Universe !