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Should I gamble all I have on a 1% chance of winning $100 million, or a 99% chance of winning $1 million?

well that's a fine question, lass. i commend you on your caution leading you to ask rather than steaming ahead in a devil-may-care fashion. the answer depends on a few things: 1) how much do you have? 2) how much do you owe? 3) how comfortable are you with risk?; and 4) how long before you expect to kick off?

if your net worth is 4 dollars, i recommend going for the cool million. if you are already a millionaire, i would point out that there's no obvious reason to take either risk. you already have it made in the shade. if you currently have many millions of dollars' worth of debt, a cool million won't help much, so go for the big bucks. if you're comfortable with risk, either option sounds exciting. if you're not comfortable with risk, then my answer is 'no'. your remaining life expectancy may be a key deciding factor. more people will want a piece of that $100M pie, see, and do you really want to deal with that every day for 45 years?

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That's a lucid well thought out answer, It covers all the parameters one could envisage, it is somewhat unlikely I would risk one or the other so thank you but then maybe this would provoke your excellent intellect...What is the numerical solution to a physics equation about how matter changes into other matter?

i'm not sure of what you're asking now. E = mc^2 is an equation relating to changes (or differences) in mass. for example, if you broke apart four carbon-12 atoms and used the bits to assemble three oxygen-16 atoms (each of these sets contains 24 protons and 24 neutrons, so you'd have exactly the right number of bits to do it), you might expect that the three oxygens would weigh exactly the same as the four carbons. but they don't since the intranuclear forces holding the bits together are stronger in an oxygen atom, so when the oxygen atom forms, some extra energy escapes as photons. that energy comes from some of the mass of the bits, and so the mass of an oxygen atom is 'low' as compared with the simple expectation. the amount of energy is calculable from Einstein's equation since we know the precise masses of C-12 and O-16.