One of the earliest physical principles learned by budding physicists is that energy is conserved. This is the idea that energy is not ‘made’ or ‘destroyed’ but can only be transferred by interactions between objects or systems. However, we cannot always explain these interactions easily – there has to be a physical mechanism that allows a change to happen. One such example that is often only discussed later in physics courses is the energy associated with mass and the celebrated relationship E = mc2 , with c being the speed of light.
Some textbooks get over this problem by including mass and energy in the conservation law. This is fine, but there is still the problem of a physical mechanism that allows mass to turn into energy.
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