IshmaelM said:
So when they say energy is it in the firm of Heat?
With enough heat will it be possible to replicate matter?
When do you think it will be financially feasible to be able to create matter? What idea will make it possible?
Those replicators from star trek
Yes, you can create matter from "heat" in the form of thermal radiation, but the scale of it is extreme. The universe did it the first couple of hundred thousands of years after the big bang until the expansion cooled it down enough, then the first atoms condensed out of the thermal soup. This is what we today detect as background radiation in radio astronomy.
Easiest way to create new matter is to accelerate particles and let them collide. That is routine stuff in Cern in LHC, the Large Hadron Collider. The drawback is that most of the matter is radioactive and decays in seconds.
So in a way we are already creating matter but nothing as massively as the Star trek replicators does. The amount of power needed to create a "Cup of tea, Earl Grey, hot!" is immense. Remember 1g equals a 20 kiloton nuclear bomb, so that cup of tea demands at least 200 times as much (200 g) energy. That means if the replicator runs at 99.5% efficiency in converting matter into energy and then back into matter again it would equal a 20 kiloton nuclear bomb going off just in losses each time you order a cup of tea, the device needs to be tough enough to handle the power of 200 nuclear devices to do the transformation.
I don't think we will ever see anything close to replicators. What we will see is 3d-printers of various materials that will become more and more advanced, mixing materials and creating finer structures. Maybe we will see a 3d-printer that could print a cup of tea at the same time it fills it with hot water and adding flavoring agents. But that is not creating matter, just printing it from various precursors.
Göran