Comment by zem
8 days ago
to be fair, fusion does violate conservation of mass, just not the way the teacher explained it. the loss of mass is where the energy comes from.
8 days ago
to be fair, fusion does violate conservation of mass, just not the way the teacher explained it. the loss of mass is where the energy comes from.
Yes, together with mass-energy equivalency it would form a coherent argument, and then also a correct one - but the thing is that if incomplete, it still might sound funky enough to you to research it if you care.
I think it helps that it's a very narrow field to look at, compared to fuzzy and big-picture view of social studies, for example. So much room to be confidently wrong... And sadly I can't think of a solution, LLMs or not.
Yes, there is no law of conservation for mass like there is for energy. Fusion is a good example for why it's not conserved. The teacher was right.
He was right that it violates conservation of mass. He was completely wrong that it violated it by adding 2 atomic mass units when hydrogen fuses.
In reality heavier isotopes of hydrogen fuse, conserving the total number of nucleons, but the resulting hydrogen has a lower rest mass than the parent particles. The extra mass is released as energy and the total energy is conserved.
By his logic the system either violated energy conservation (by creating nucleons while releasing energy) or was endothermic (creating nucleons from the surrounding energy).
There actually is a law of conservation of mass (it's the same law, because mass is energy) and it only appears violated if you forget about the particles that are zooming away at the speed of light. Of course the mass of a system changes if mass can flow in and out.
Mass is not the same as energy. Mass can be converted to energy or has energy, but a photon, for example, is massless while carrying energy.
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