> Then the energy remaining at the end of the process would not be zero.
I didn’t say it would be. The final energy would be in the rest mass of the particles, and that’s all the energy there would be, despite just having pumped an entire star masses worth of energy into it to counteract the gravitational energy of the star.
You’re reading what I wrote and then filtering that into something completely different. You’re not actually replying to what I’m saying, but some bizarre distorted misunderstanding of it. To illustrate...
> Because you said "the energy required would be equal to the energy in those particles (from their mass, nuclear forces,
etc)"; you included "mass" in the energy that would be
required to overcome gravity, and would therefore be gone at
the end of the process.
I didn’t say anything about using the mass of the particles to move them about. That is utter nonsense. I just said that’s how much energy it would take. It’s a general point about the amount of energy in the system.
"The energy cost of disassembling a star equals the energy in the star, so the net energy of the star is zero."
> The final energy would be in the rest mass of the particles
Which contradicts the previous statement of yours that I just quoted. Rest mass counts as energy, so the net energy of the star is not zero, it's the star's rest mass.
> despite just having pumped an entire star masses worth of energy into it to counteract the gravitational energy of the star.
No, you would not have to pump an entire star mass's worth of energy into the star to disassemble it. The numbers are easy to run for a typical star, say the Sun, if we assume it to be a spherical distribution of matter with uniform density (an idealization, but it's enough to get the order of magnitude of the energy involved). The gravitational binding energy of such a mass distribution is U = (3/5) G M^2 / R. The numbers for the Sun are:
G = 6.67e-11
M = 1.989e30
R = 6.957e8
This gives U = 2.28e41.
Compare this to the rest energy of the sun, which is M c^2; for c = 299792458 this gives 1.79e47. So the gravitational binding energy of the Sun, which is the amount of energy that would need to be added to the Sun to completely disassemble it, is roughly 1 millionth of the Sun's rest mass.
(Note, btw, that this energy is added to the Sun, so the total energy of the disassembled Sun is larger, by about 1 part per million, than the total energy of the Sun in its current bound state.)
The stars energy is its rest mass plus the energy in its gravitational field. That gravitational energy is negative. Otherwise we have all sorts of problems with conservation laws. The energy model for the early universe with its dispersed array of unbound atoms and photons is a matter of record. There are plenty of referenced articles available and I have already explained how to find them. There’s no point complaining to me about it.
Your calculation of the stars binding energy uses the classical formula, but for a star and the universe generally you need to use relativity. The calculations for this are in the paper linked from reference 5 in the Wikipedia page on the zero energy universe. It’s a free pdf download.
I didn’t say it would be. The final energy would be in the rest mass of the particles, and that’s all the energy there would be, despite just having pumped an entire star masses worth of energy into it to counteract the gravitational energy of the star.
You’re reading what I wrote and then filtering that into something completely different. You’re not actually replying to what I’m saying, but some bizarre distorted misunderstanding of it. To illustrate...
> Because you said "the energy required would be equal to the energy in those particles (from their mass, nuclear forces, etc)"; you included "mass" in the energy that would be required to overcome gravity, and would therefore be gone at the end of the process.
I didn’t say anything about using the mass of the particles to move them about. That is utter nonsense. I just said that’s how much energy it would take. It’s a general point about the amount of energy in the system.