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Glite Dictionary
rest energy

rest energy

8.2
Energy equal to a particle's mass when it is not moving, calculated as mass times the speed of light squared
  • noun
  • /rɛst ˈɛnərdʒi/
  • Specialized
translation icon : energía en reposo
  • Rest energy represents the amount of energy contained in a particle due to its mass when it is not in motion.

So with that mass MI could associate to this particle a rest energy MC squared.

Examples

  • This is adding up the rest energy of every particle in this star.

  • Well, first of all, it's the rest energy of the Muon and the neutrino, OK.

  • In this case, m is the rest energy and p is the momentum (or kinetic energy).

    Blog text (34)

  • So with that mass MI could associate to this particle a rest energy MC squared.

    MIT OpenCourseWare

  • Under what circumstances would E GS be nonnegligible compared to a body's rest energy?

    Academic text (1999)

  • Does any contribution Delta E, of whatever kind, to the rest energy of a body contribute Delta E/c² to its gravitational mass?

    Academic text (1999)

  • The reason you can't accelerate an object to create a black hole is that mass (or more properly, rest energy, the amount of energy in the object's rest frame, but I'll use mass in the rest of this post) really doesn't increase. Mass, in the strictly formal mathematics used in relativity, is an invariant.

    Blog text (34)

  • The rest energy of an electron is calculated using its mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light.

  • In physics, the concept of rest energy plays a crucial role in understanding the behavior of particles at rest.

Synonyms

mass energy
vsrest energy
  • Specialized
1 7.9

Energy an object has because of its mass, as in E = mc²

specifies the energy equivalent for a particle at rest using rest mass times c^2

Surface Forms

rest energy singular
rest energies plural

Morphology

rest + energy

The phrase is compositionally interpretable: a learner who knows 'rest' (not moving) and 'energy' can infer it refers to the energy associated with being at rest (i.e. 'energy of rest'). However, the specific technical sense as the mass–energy equivalence (E = mc²) is specialized and not derivable from the words alone for a B1 learner, so the expression is only partially predictable.

Etymology

Rest energy comes from Einstein's idea that even when an object is at rest and 'not moving', it still has a large amount of energy stored in its mass. The formula E = mc² shows that 'rest energy' is the energy that comes from mass, so the term means the energy a particle has when it is not moving.