To understand what energy is, you must first understand that, according to calculations, every atom in your body should have just 1-2% of the mass that you have now.
The reasoning for this is the fact that atoms are made up of quarks - the elementary particles that cannot be broken any more. Quarks are never seen alone and are always connected to another quark via flux tube that would only stretch the more you try to separate them and once you hit the limit, the flux tube would use all the energy they gained to create another pair of quarks.
All these quarks can come in pairs of top & down quark, up & bottom quark, and charm & strange quark but atom’s nucleon (neutron and proton) can have any odd number of quarks that moves inside the nucleon. Now, this is where the mass of the neutron and proton comes from – which makes up just 2% of the atom’s total mass. Where does the 98% comes from?
It comes from the part where quarks move inside the nucleon at speeds nearing the speed of light. This creates energy (called gluon fields) that cannot escape for they are held bound by the strong nuclear force. This energy is a lot; a single carbon atom holds as much as 2000 joules and denser atoms like uranium can hold as much as 8000 joules, each.
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