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Re: What Flows?


Hi Folks,
I'm back after a summers hiatus. Hiking in the Appalachians was a joyeous
experience away from the stresses of everyday life; I recommend it highly.

comment on the "what flows" discussion. Someone wrote:

Further there is another facet of the physics which is blurred: For energy
to flow (twitch) from one body to another there *must* be work done by the
one body on the other. Don't you want your students to understand this?

Put a higher temperature object in thermal contact with a lower temperature
object. Heat flows from the hot object to the colder object, thereby
increasing the energy of the cool object and decreasing the energy of the
hot object. One might describe this as a "energy flow" and yet it occured
without work being done by one body on another. Therefore I disagree with
what was said above.

Joel Rauber
rauberj@mg.sdstate.edu