What was Einstein’s most mind-blowing discovery? | Ask an astronomer | Michelle Thaller | Big Think

If you were to convert my hand into pure energy using Einstein's equation, you could have nuclear Armageddon on a global scale. There is so much mass in here that if you were to convert me into pure energy, I could blow up the part.

There are very few people in the world we're going to simply say their name—you and me—we can picture them. Probably many different images of them, and one of them certainly is Einstein, right? I just say that word, and all of a sudden you're thinking about sort of crazy white hair and the mustache. Somebody who is brilliant, you know, those wonderful knowing eyes with lots of smile lines around them.

Everybody knows who Einstein is, and people understand that he was a very famous scientist. But I think that people often don't grasp the true depth and then the profound nature of the things that Einstein introduced to us. I also spend a lot of time debunking, in some ways, the myth of Albert Einstein. A lot of people seem to think that he was somebody that worked outside of traditional academics. He wasn't part of the academic establishment; he came up with all this brilliant stuff all by himself.

Well, that wasn't true either. Einstein was a professor. He actually taught a lot at the University of Bern and also in Berlin, and then eventually came to Princeton. He was very much a product of the time and the science that was going on. There were brilliant people at this time; science was changing in so many different ways. For a lot of things, Einstein found himself kind of in the right place at the right time to see two different things going on and say, "Aha! Those things actually go together."

To me, that really was some of the real brilliance of Einstein—he became a bridge between many, many different subject matters. It amazes me that he was one of the people, when he was doing his doctoral dissertation, figured out the size and speed of the molecules in the air all around you.

People didn't realize at the time, when Einstein was a younger student in college, that air was made of molecules—little things that are constantly bouncing off each other and bouncing off of you, and that's what we think of as air. It became known that there was a tremendous number of molecules. I mean, to give you an idea, in a best square foot of air, I have got a square foot of air of volume in front of me. How many molecules are in a square foot of air? The answer is approximately 10 to the 23, which means a one with 23 zeros after it.

That's such a big number we don't have a name for it, and all of those molecules are bouncing off you with hundreds of miles an hour. Can you imagine when they realized that's what air really was? Einstein was a major figure in that, and then there were so many other things he did.

But I think that if I were to ask you what is Einstein really known for, you know, the thing that would pop into your head—even if you don't know what it means—is the equation E equals MC squared. So this is something that I have to say takes my breath away in the implications of this. It is absolutely incredible what it means.

Is that energy, pure energy, is really the same thing as matter, as mass? When we talk about matter, I'm made of matter, made of atoms and molecules—it's a solid thing. What you're really talking about, in many ways, is the fact that I have mass; I have something that you can measure the gravity of. I'm a solid substance.

Think about energy; maybe an example of pure energy could be a beam of light. A beam of light has no mass at all. There's no substance to it; it doesn't have a volume. It's just pure energy. E equals MC squared is the bridge, and this is what Einstein was so brilliant at—bridging two very different parts of the universe all at once: the world of matter and the world of pure energy.

C in this equation represents the speed of light, and the speed of light is a huge number. So, I mean, to give it to you just in some units you might be able to understand, the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. So that's how fast light travels through space, through its empty space. It would go about 186,000...