Pure energy what is

It only takes a minute to sign up. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. In both the cases there's massive amount of energy involved. I keep hearing the word "Pure Energy" instead of just "Energy". What is pure energy? How is it different from just energy? Energy can take many forms mass, kinetic energy, or any of many forms of potential energy , but no one of them is "pure" in any sense, no more so than any other form. That being said, I would guess that when non-physicists use the term "pure energy," they're likely referring to some form of energy that isn't directly associated with a particle of matter.

The most common example is probably electromagnetic radiation. For example, as Ted said in his answer to the linked question , when matter and antimatter annihilate, you start with some matter fermions and end with no matter no fermions.

But the final state still has energy since energy is conserved , so in the popular view, one might label the energy of that final state "pure" because the state is devoid of what we commonly consider matter. Since photons EM radiation are common reaction products for these processes, they get associated with the phrase "pure energy.

Energy is a property of light and matter and not a substance in itself. In nuclear fusion, nucleons combine to form bound states with lower total energies than their separate components and the difference is mainly released as high energy photons and neutrinos. Black holes do not devour themselves when they get too big. A quasar is an active galactic core, where a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy is accreting huge amounts of matter.

When people say "pure energy", they mean energy which can be readily used to lift a weight off the ground. Email Address. Skip to content. Home About Faq. Is this not a paradox? Q: What is energy? Posted on April 19, by The Physicist. Email Print Facebook Reddit Twitter. This entry was posted in -- By the Physicist , Physics. Bookmark the permalink. Angel Mendez Rivera says:. March 13, at pm.

Read comments above for reference. Pure Energy says:. September 28, at pm. John Kallenbach says:. June 9, at pm. Anonymous says:. November 29, at am. Carl says:. December 18, at pm. August 7, at pm. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Comment Name Email Website Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Despite the possibility that some of the properties listed above can be seen as redundant, this does not change the fact that photons exhibit many more properties than just their energy.

There are also some properties that photons do not exhibit, simply by their nature of being photons. The following list denotes properties that photons do not have:.

As we see, mass is just one of many properties that a fundamental object may or may not have. As such, the presence of mass does not confer on an object any extra degree of physical reality, even though mass is the property that we are most familiar with in everyday life. Furthermore, the absence of mass does not make an object any more "pure". We are so familiar with mass in everyday life that we may be tempted to say, "an object with no mass does not really exist.

The more accurate statement would be, "an object with no physically observable properties does not really exist. Again, the lack of mass does not automatically imply that the object is pure energy, since there are so many other properties involved. Note that mass is actually just another form of energy. The total energy of a fundamental object is its mass energy plus its kinetic energy note that potential energy is held by systems of objects and not by single objects.