Talk:Mass–energy equivalence

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Former good article nomineeMass–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.
On this day... Article milestones
DateProcessResult
March 16, 2009Good article nomineeNot listed
October 22, 2020Peer reviewReviewed
June 19, 2021Good article nomineeNot listed
On this day... 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

Practical examples referencing[edit]

I'm concerned that § Practical examples could leave skeptical readers still-skeptical. The idea that "mass becomes energy" (or vice versa) is not intuitive, and the descriptive text, while seemingly accurate, is fairly technical. Readers who are new to all this and say "stop snowing me with math, I wanna see evidence" might reasonably look to this section. But the section is only working the math: plugging known starting values into preceding equations and saying "look, here's what the calculator says" and that seems to be all the references there say either. We don't have earth-mass data, measured product-mass of the A-bombs over Japan, etc. So it takes for granted that even the general ideas, and further, the unit-conversions and constant-factors, are actually true. That is, it's all a risk of "WP:INUNIVERSE" for a topic that is proposed as completely non-fiction. I think this article needs to highlight actual examples of the experimental validation of measured mass before/after (demonstrating that it actually changes) and ideally measured energy gained/released (demonstrating that the specific formula is correct). DMacks (talk) 16:43, 18 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. One example would be that the plutonium in the Fat Man bomb weighed 5 pounds, but released the same energy as 15,000 tonnes of TNT. Unfortunately I'm not good enough on the physics to write it in, and we should really be quoting in Wikipedia. I guess books like Dancing Wu Li Masters are places to look for these examples. For Evolution, Richard Dawkins is a great explainer. So many of these science articles lack a simple, understandable explanation. Billyshiverstick (talk) 05:50, 16 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This is a bad article, too much talk, and NOT the most important issue: to show clear and clean Bold textin the initial paragraphs how Einstein deduced that Energy is mass x c2, not to speak of all the people from Newton to Poincare (who basically discovered all of Einstein's before him, as Broglie did with most of Bohr, it seems though French do not have the P.R.E.SS than 'you' know... who expressed the same ideas, ignored here, (which comes latter among many other partial explanations) it is a shame that no physicists have not written properly such a key article of their discipline — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.151.76.210 (talk) 16:54, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]