how did Einstein's discovery change the law of conservation of matter?

Answer 1

Are you referring to his special theory of relativity?

It essentially showed that matter and energy could be interchangable and that a seperate law of conservation of matter was not needed and that the law of conservation energy should be considered the law of conservation of mass-energy.

Answer 2

All three of your previous answers are wrong.

What Einstein showed was that mass was not frame invariant. This is a very important result, because it implicitly means that you have to consider mass-energy if you want to apply a conservation law when more than one frame is involved.

It also naturally imples E = mc^2 which is not a formula for conversion of mass to energy but an equivalence between mass and energy. The reason he did not associate it with mass production from energy is that no mechanism for this was known at the time.

To see what this equivalence means, the quarks in proton and neutrons have a rest mass that is around 1/5 of the mass of the proton or neutron. The remainder of the mass we observe arises from the binding energy of the quarks. This energy has a mass equivalence as observed from our frame. There is no magic conversion of mass to energy or otherwise here.

Answer 3

rhm550 is correct. The development of the special theory led to the equivalence of mass and energy, but Einstein did not interpret this at that time as the conversion of mass to energy. Even in the atomic bomb or nuclear reactors, no actual material matter is converted to energy (all the original protons, neutrons, etc. still remain). The energy released has a mass equivalent in the binding energy of the nuclear components, so that the total mass of the reaction products is less than the initial mass of the fissioned atom.

Answer 4

Prior to einstein, it was thought that matter was neither created nor destroyed. Einstein's special theory of relativity proposes that E = mc^2, so matter could be converted into energy.