Talk:Mass–energy equivalence

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Mass–energy equivalence was a Natural sciences good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
March 16, 2009	Good article nominee	Not listed
October 22, 2020	Peer review	Reviewed
June 19, 2021	Good article nominee	Not listed
A fact from this article was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "On this day..." column on September 27, 2010.
Current status: Former good article nominee

The statement about an isothermal open system is problematic

I just added a "Clarification needed" tag to this portion of the introduction:

"The equivalence principle implies that when energy is lost in chemical reactions, nuclear reactions, and other energy transformations, the system will also lose a corresponding amount of mass."

This is not usually how I see this concept taught, because it is only true if the particles and molecules in the system are brought back to the same kinetic energy, i.e. the same thermal energy. Basically, it is considering an open system and what might qualify as an isothermal process, although I'm not sure if it's technically isothermal.

I usually see this taught by using a closed system, and rather than saying "energy and mass both exit the system", you say that "within the closed system, the rest mass that went away now remains in the system as kinetic energy and/or heat, thermal energy, which is merely the kinetic energy of particles and molecules".

I've seen examples with both chemical reactions and nuclear reactions, where the masses of the products are compared to the masses of the reactants, and this is shown to be equal to the energy released by the reaction. If you imagine that the reaction took place in thermal contact with some "outside environment", then you start to have problems because reaching the same temperature will not necessarily cause the correct amount of thermal energy to leave the system. Did the volume of the system expand or contract? What is going on with entropy? Now the specifics of the chemical or nuclear reaction become relevant to what temperature it will be. It seems preferable to use a closed system, and notice that the temperature has increased and possibly the matter has expanded (perhaps it even exploded), and now the energy is in the molecules as a mixture of heat and/or kinetic energy of blast particles moving away from the center. A very small "system" might be one uranium atom that undergoes spontaneous fission and results in particles spreading out, it has no well-defined temperature but the net momentum starts and remains zero, and the lost mass is conserved as kinetic energy in the fragments flying outwards. Fluoborate (talk) 21:58, 14 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The paragraph was a mess. Rather than expand the introduction with discussion of closed/open systems, I simply corrected the sentence. Please review. Johnjbarton (talk) 14:44, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]