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re: c squared
Daniel — (archived)

c squared in the formula, serves only as a scaling factor to show how much energy you get from a given amount of mass. This is a different context to other derivations which deal with mass and speed and show how as you approach c, your energy of motion becomes increasingly converted to mass, until at speed c itself you'd be piling on an infinite amount of mass and couldn't budge another inch no matter how hard you tried ...

But there's nothing to stop taking the value c and using it in different arguments to get new and insightful results. Here as i said, c squared scales mass-energy equivalence, so that one kilogram of mass (for instance) is equivalent to (1 kg) x (3 x 10^8) x (3 x 10^8) = 9 x 10^16 Joules or about 90 quadrillion Joules (in Yank terminology).

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