# Tag Info

8

The energy of an element of a traveling wave is not constant. Halliday-Resnick-Krane is right. For a string of density $\mu$ and tension $T$ the kinetic energy of an element $dx$ is $$dK=\frac 12\mu dx\left(\frac{\partial \xi}{\partial t}\right)^2.$$ For the potential energy we have $$dU=Tdl,$$ where $dl$ is the stretched amount of the string. A small ...

4

There are already good answers here, but I'm afraid that to the best of my knowledge, Diracology's (and indeed Halliday-Resnik-Krane's) expression of the potential energy is not correct. I would like to point to this paper by Lior M. Burko which focusses on the subtleties of the derivation of the kinetic and potential energy of the string as a whole and ...

4

The second derivation is correct, as explained by Diracology. However, the first derivation is 'sort of' correct, in the sense that the location of potential energy can be ambiguous. For example, consider the three following systems. A mass on a stretched spring. A mass sitting on a table. A charged mass next to another charge. These three systems have ...

2

Short answer: no. I'll give some context with the details of the simplest examples. In the context of conservation laws, "energy" refers to the Hamiltonian. In classical mechanics, a quantity without explicit time dependence is conserved iff its Poisson bracket with the Hamiltonian is 0. In quantum mechanics, quantities are promoted to operators on a ...

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible