Prakash Per­sad

To the mass­es, mass and mat­ter are one and the same. But if one were to go to the heart of the mat­ter, they are dif­fer­ent.Mat­ter is phys­i­cal sub­stance that oc­cu­pies space and has rest mass. Mass is an in­trin­sic prop­er­ty of mat­ter. En­er­gy can al­so have mass.

Any­one who has heard of the great sci­en­tist Al­bert Ein­stein knows of the re­la­tion­ship be­tween mass and en­er­gy, as in­di­cat­ed in his fa­mous equa­tion: en­er­gy is equal to the prod­uct of mass and the square of the speed of light. Light en­er­gy is a stream of pho­tons which have mass.It stands to rea­son, then, that if mat­ter can be trans­formed to en­er­gy (as is the case in nu­clear pow­er plants) then en­er­gy should be able to be con­vert­ed in­to mat­ter.

A week or so ago, physi­cists at Im­pe­r­i­al Col­lege, Lon­don, claimed that they have, in prin­ci­ple, shown how to make mat­ter from light us­ing high-pow­er lasers. They hope to car­ry out an ex­per­i­ment in a year's time to ac­com­plish the task.In 1934, two Amer­i­can the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cists, Dr Gre­go­ry Bre­it and Dr John A Wheel­er, in­di­cat­ed that it was pos­si­ble to cre­ate mat­ter from light, but were of the view that to demon­strate this ex­per­i­men­tal­ly might not be pos­si­ble as the re­quired ex­per­i­men­tal con­di­tions would be quite dif­fi­cult to achieve.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers