The Greatest Breakthrough in the History of Science and Physics – It has just happened.

Baylor grads remember the very popular physics professor at Baylor, Dr. Robert Packard. Many students wanted to take his introductory physics course which he made so very interesting for non-science students.

When he first came to Baylor his brilliance was little known. However, at that time, he taught me and a few others Baylors’ most advanced physics courses. We just loved him, for he was so close to God. He died recently at age 94. And he did not get to see the recent greatest breakthrough in all physics history. It is the most amazing scientific fete of all time.

Einstein predicted its theoretical possibility 80 years ago with his famous E=mc² formula, which states that energy and matter (or mass) are interchangeable. The formula has now been proved, for actual matter has been created from pure light……real matter from pure light only.

It has been done at the Brookhaven National Laboratory under the U.S. Department of Energy. They caused two gold (Au) ions to move in opposite directions at 99.995% of the speed of light. As the ions pass one another without colliding, two photons from the electromagnetic cloud surrounding the ions can interact with each other to create a matter-antimatter pair: an electron and a positron. It was possible by using some of the most powerful lasers ever created.

In UPTON, NY—Scientists studying particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)—a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science user facility for nuclear physics research at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory—have produced definitive evidence for physics phenomena predicted more than 80 years ago. The results were derived from a detailed analysis of more than 6,000 pairs of electrons and positrons produced in glancing particle collisions at the RHIC.

The primary finding is that pairs of electrons and positrons—particles of matter and antimatter—can be created directly by colliding with very energetic photons, which are quantum “packets” of light. This conversion of energetic light into matter is a direct consequence of Einstein’s famous E=MC² equation, which states that energy and matter (or mass) are interchangeable. Nuclear reactions in the sun and at nuclear power plants regularly convert matter into energy. Now scientists have converted light energy directly into matter in a single step.

In other words, the results depend on the ability of RHIC’s STAR detector—the Solenoid Tracker at RHIC—to measure the angular distribution of particles produced in glancing collisions of gold ions (Au) moving at nearly the speed of light.