converting energy to matter

The Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful proton smasher in the world, includes the ATLAS detector, one of the LHC’s four particle detectors. (image: CERN)

On page 169 of the third in the series (Sharon of Two Salems: All the World's a Stage) is the following passage:

BLAM, BLAM, BLAM! The discharges from outer space struck the enclosed trailer that Claire had quickly constructed.... Inside the trailer a dense battery grew, as the energy from Sharon’s lightning was converted to mass. It fell to Sharon to make the battery large enough to fill the U-Haul—and to do so quickly. Claire had calculated ten strikes would be just right, and if the last one was even a little bit too much, the excess energy would dissipate into the air, rather than letting the battery break the struts on the inside of the trailer.

What happens here takes a huge leap of imagination. The idea of someone being able to call lightning down from the sky with their mind will be discussed in another post (!), for there is some news to report on the other topic touched on here: the conversion of energy into mass.

The state of research on this science is in its infancy. Right now, it's going to take an experiment with the LHC (the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva) that will use an enormous amount of energy to hopefully produce an almost immeasurably small amount of mass. From Science Daily:

First proton collisions at world's largest science experiment should start in early June

Date:

April 28, 2015

Source:

Southern Methodist University

Summary:

First collisions of protons at the world's largest science experiment should start the first or second week of June. The LHC restarted is second run in early April. There are no significant signs of new physics yet, but DeRoeck said it will take only one significant deviation in the data to change everything.

To make it clear why this will help in this area of research, the following explanation is from an article posted a year ago on the website of London's Imperial College:

Scientists discover how to turn light into matter after 80-year quest

Imperial physicists have discovered how to create matter from light - a feat thought impossible when the idea was first theorised 80 years ago. 

In just one day over several cups of coffee in a tiny office in Imperial’s Blackett Physics Laboratory, three physicists worked out a relatively simple way to physically prove a theory first devised by scientists Breit and Wheeler in 1934. 

Breit and Wheeler suggested that it should be possible to turn light into matter by smashing together only two particles of light (photons), to create an electron and a positron – the simplest method of turning light into matter ever predicted. The calculation was found to be theoretically sound but Breit and Wheeler said that they never expected anybody to physically demonstrate their prediction. It has never been observed in the laboratory and past experiments to test it have required the addition of massive high-energy particles... 

The new research, published in Nature Photonics, shows for the first time how Breit and Wheeler’s theory could be proven in practice. This ‘photon-photon collider’, which would convert light directly into matter using technology that is already available, would be a new type of high-energy physics experiment. This experiment would recreate a process that was important in the first 100 seconds of the universe and that is also seen in gamma ray bursts, which are the biggest explosions in the universe and one of physics’ greatest unsolved mysteries.