Questions tagged [energy-conservation]
The law of conservation of energy, which states that the amount of energy in a system is constant. For questions about Earth's environment, see the climate-science tag instead.
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What happens to the energy when waves perfectly cancel each other?
What happens to the energy when waves perfectly cancel each other (destructive interference)? It appears that the energy "disappear" but the law of conservation of energy states that it can't be ...
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Why bother buying efficient lights if you are already heating your house?
Assume I live in a location where at any time of day and any time of year, I need to heat my house. Assume further that I have a room with no windows. In this case, does it make sense for me to buy ...
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What makes running so much less energy-efficient than bicycling?
Most people can ride 10 km on their bike. However, running 10 km is a lot harder to do. Why?
According to the law of conservation of energy, bicycling should be more intensive because you have to ...
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When I walk down the stairs where does my potential energy go?
When I leave my room I walk down three flights of stairs releasing about 7kJ of potential energy. Where does it go? Is it all getting dispersed into heat and sound? Is that heat being generated at the ...
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Why do travelling waves continue after amplitude sum = 0?
My professor asked an interesting question at the end of the last class, but I can't figure out the answer. The question is this (recalled from memory):
There are two travelling wave pulses moving in ...
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Where does the extra kinetic energy come from in a gravitational slingshot?
I read in this answer in this site that the KE a free-falling ball acquires is not originated by the attracting body but that energy was actually stored in the ball when it had been lifted to the ...
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Is the total energy of the universe zero?
In popular science books and articles, I keep running into the claim that the total energy of the Universe is zero, "because the positive energy of matter is cancelled out by the negative energy of ...
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Why does a ping pong ball bounce higher when it is dropped together with a cup of water?
Setup: an official ping pong ball is floating inside a party plastic cup filled with clean water, which is then dropped from a certain height onto a soft mat.
Observation: the ping pong ball shoots up ...
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Why can't energy be created or destroyed?
My physics instructor told the class, when lecturing about energy, that it can't be created or destroyed. Why is that? Is there a theory or scientific evidence that proves his statement true or ...
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Why are rockets so big?
I'm curious why rockets are so big in their size. Since both the gravitational potential one need to overcome in order to put thing into orbit, and the chemical energy burned from the fuel, are ...
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If I'm floating in space and I turn on a flashlight, will I accelerate?
Photons have no mass but they can push things, as evidenced by laser propulsion.
Can photons push the source which is emitting them? If yes, will a more intense flashlight accelerate me more? Does ...
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What allows a pull-back toy car to drive further than it was pushed?
Imagine you have a pull back toy car. Its back part is on $x_0$. You push it down and move it in the back direction to the point $y$ (not marked):
Then you leave the car to move away:
Then you mark ...
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How does light speed up after coming out of a glass slab?
As I learned today in school, my teacher told me that when light enters a glass slab it slows down due to the change in density and it speeds up as it goes out of the glass slab. This causes a lateral ...
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Why doesn't this perpetual motion machine using the buoyant force work?
I realize this isn't possible, but I can't see why not, especially if you change the model a little bit so that the balls simply travel through a tube of water on the way up, rather than exactly this ...
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Why do many people say that virtual particles do not conserve energy?
I've seen this claim made all over the Internet. It's on Wikipedia. It's in John Baez's FAQ on virtual particles, it's in many popular books. I've even seen it mentioned offhand in academic papers. ...
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When water climbs up a piece of paper, where is the energy coming from?
Take a glass of water and piece of toilet paper. If you keep the paper vertical, and touch the surface of the water with the tip of the paper, you can see the water being absorbed and climbing up the ...
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Why don't electron-positron collisions release infinite energy?
Questions of the form:
An electron and a positron collide with E MeV of energy, what is the frequency of the photons released.
quite often come up in my A Level course (for often fairly arbitrary ...
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Why can't I do this to get infinite energy?
I know that I cannot do this because of conservation of energy, so I am looking for an answer as to why this will not work.
So by my understanding of Einstein's whole famous $E=mc^2$ thing it is ...
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Why can electric cars recoup energy from braking, but a spaceship cannot?
It is said that in a spaceship, you need to spend as much energy to brake as you spent for accelerating. An electric car, however, charges its batteries while braking, thus it actually recovers energy ...
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Do virtual particles actually physically exist?
I have heard virtual particles pop in and out of existence all the time, most notable being the pairs that pop out beside black holes and while one gets pulled away. But wouldn't this actually violate ...
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Why do we need to know the shape of the slide to find the time to slide down it?
In my physics book after this solved example:
A child of mass $m$ is initially at rest on top of a water slide at height h = 8.5m above the bottom of the slide. Assuming that the slide is ...
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Kinetic energy with respect to different reference frames
I'm having problems understanding the following situation. Suppose two 1-tonne cars are going with the same orientations but opposite senses, each 50 km/h with respect to the road. Then the total ...
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Is this cheap "air conditioner" able to cool a room?
My parents bought this "air conditioner", but I am very skeptical that this can cool a room, or even cool anything.
I doubt that it even has a cooling element, I suspect that it is just a fan + ...
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Where does the extra force generated by a lever come from?
Given an object being pulled down to earth by a force of 1000 lb:
If a machine were to lift it off the ground for me, and I grabbed on to the rope before it was released, there is no way in the world ...
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Newton's cradle
Why, when one releases 2 balls in Newton's cradle, two balls on the opposite side bounce out at approximately the same speed as the 1st pair, rather than one ball at higher speed, or 3 balls at lower ...
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Where does the extra kinetic energy of the rocket come from?
Consider a rocket in deep space with no external forces. Using the formula for linear kinetic energy
$$\text{KE} = mv^2/2$$
we find that adding $100\ \text{m/s}$ while initially travelling at $1000\ \...
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Redshifting of Light and the expansion of the universe
So I have learned in class that light can get red-shifted as it travels through space. As I understand it, space itself expands and stretches out the wavelength of the light. This results in the light ...
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What is the energy source if a tall water tank is used to transfer floating objects upwards instead of cables with motors?
Suppose I want to transport some logs from the ground to the roof of a tower. Originally I can use a lift, or some cables, or even move the logs upwards manually; then the energy is converted to the ...
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Conservation of energy and Doppler effect?
From what I understand, the frequency of light coming from a source moving towards an observer increases. From $ E=h\nu $ , this implies an increase in the energy of each photon.
What really is ...
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Is it correct to say that it is theoretically impossible for perfect rigid bodies to exist?
If perfect rigid bodies were to exist, then consider a scenario in which two rigid bodies of equal masses moving with velocities of equal magnitude but opposite in direction colliding against one ...
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Is energy really conserved?
In high school I was taught energy was conserved. Then I learned that nuclear reactions allow energy to be converted into mass. Then I also heard that apparently energy can spontaneously appear in ...
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Energy conservation in General Relativity
I understand that energy conservation is not a rule in general relativity, but I'd like to know under what circumstances it can still be possible. In other words, when is it possible to associate a ...
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When a planet is heated through gravitational pull, where is the energy taken from?
Jupiters moon Io is heated through the gravitational pull of Jupiter, but when Io is heated because of this, where does that energy come from? How does conservation of energy work for this effect, ...
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Is it possible to conserve the total kinetic energy of a system, but not its momentum?
It is possible to conserve momentum without conserving kinetic energy, as in inelastic
collisions. Is it possible to conserve the total kinetic energy of a system, but not its momentum? How?
To ...
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If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into? [closed]
If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?
When the big bang happened where did it occur?
When the big bang happened how did it occur?
Where did the energy come from? Energy can not be ...
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Is the law of conservation of energy still valid?
Is the law of conservation of energy still valid or have there been experiments showing that energy could be created or lost?
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Is kinetic energy a relative quantity? Will it make inconsistent equations when applying it to the conservation of energy equations? [duplicate]
If the velocity is a relative quantity, will it make inconsistent equations when applying it to the conservation of energy equations?
For example:
In the train moving at $V$ relative to ground, ...
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What prevents this magnetic perpetuum mobile from working?
As a child, I imagined this device, which may seem to rotate indefinitely. I have two questions.
Is this perpetual motion machine already known? If it is, could you please give some references?
What ...
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Why can't we store light in the form of light?
We can store cold (ice), heat (i.e. hot water bag) and electrical charge (batteries). We can even "store" a magnetic field in a magnet. We can convert light into energy and then, if we want, back to ...
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How much additional mass does the Earth gain each day from solar radiation?
According to this answer, energy has some (minimal) mass associated with it. Therefore, when lots of energy hits the earth (such as solar radiation in a 24 hour period) shouldn't the earth gain some ...
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How is information related to energy in physics?
I recently attended a talk by Dr. Ravi Gomatam on 'quantum reality', where the speaker suggested, that conservation of energy is not a fundamental law, and is conditional, but the conservation of ...
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How do we know that energy and momentum are conserved?
How do we know energy and momentum are conserved? Are these two facts taken as axioms or have they been proven by an experiment?
This question has been in part addressed here: Conservation of ...
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Microscopically, are all collisions really elastic collisions?
I teach grade 12 physics and am about to introduce collisions. I am explaining that in elastic collisions, kinetic energy is conserved and in inelastic collisions, kinetic energy is not conserved. The ...
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Where do magnets get the energy to repel?
If I separate two magnets whose opposite poles are facing, I am adding energy. If I let go of the magnets, then presumably the energy that I added is used to move the magnets together again.
However, ...
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Noether Theorem and Energy conservation in classical mechanics
I have a problem deriving the conservation of energy from time translation invariance. The invariance of the Lagrangian under infinitesimal time displacements $t \rightarrow t' = t + \epsilon$ can be ...
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Is the energy conserved in a moving frame of reference?
Consider this situation:
When the box is at the bottom of the frictionless incline, it will have a velocity of $v_f$. The person is an inertial frame of reference that moves at a constant velocity ...
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Why do things cool down?
What I've heard from books and other materials is that heat is nothing but the sum of the movement of molecules. So, as you all know, one common myth breaker was "Unlike in movies, you don't get ...
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How does rest mass become energy?
I know that there's a difference between relativistic and rest mass. Relativistic mass is "acquired" when an object is moving at speeds comparable to the speed of light. Rest mass is the inherent mass ...
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Is the normal force a conservative force?
Most of the time the normal force doesn't do any work because it's perpendicular to the direction of motion but if it does do work, would it be conservative or non-conservative?
For example, consider ...
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Can we cool Earth by shooting powerful lasers into space? [closed]
In a sense, the climate change discussion revolves around the unwanted warming of the earth's atmosphere as a whole.
It seems a bit too obvious to be true, but could we cool the atmosphere by simply ...
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