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Re: CONSERVATION OF ENERGY, work, sound, EM



Here's the result of an epiphany I suffered regarding the nature of
energy. I don't know if others regularly use these concepts, but I don't
recall seeing them in any of the books I encounter. I found them
devestatingly enlightening, almost as much fun as discovering philosophy
in college. However I don't know if this is just an ego effect because
*I* thought of them myself, or because they inherently have that much
merit.



When I turn a crank which winds a spring, I do work.

When I turn a crank that's connected to a long shaft that winds a spring,
the "work" I've done is somehow instantly conducted from the crank to the
distant spring. Yet the shaft just turns. Is there any way to see the
"work" that flows from my fingers to the spring? Maybe.

When an auto engine drives the tires, the work done by the engine is
somehow instantly conducted along the drive shaft. Yet all I see is a
turning shaft. By looking only at the spinning shaft, I cannot tell if
the engine is sending "work" to the tires, or the opposite: if the engine
is turned off and the car is coasting and is sending "work" from the tires
to the engine. In both cases the shaft just spins.

Ah, but what if I SUDDENLY turn the crank? Or what if the engine SUDDENLY
starts up with a jerk? Then (if I have fast eyes) I will see one end of
the shaft twist a bit while the rest stays still. A wave of "twisting"
will race down the shaft and the far end will finally begin turning. So,
the shaft doesn't simply turn, there also is a wave of "something" that
moves from one end to the other. The stuff that moves is wavelike, but I
can only see it when the speed of the engine suddenly changes.

If I scrub a brush upon the floor, I perform work. The floor gets hot.
If I lay a very long pole upon the floor, attach the brush to the far end,
then grab the other end and push it back and forth, I perform work and the
brush heats up. What if the pole is 100KM long? Then when I push it
forward, the distant brush doesn't instantly move. Instead, at my end the
pole's substance compresses and also moves forward, which compresses the
next part which also moves forward, and after a long time this wave of
"work" finally reaches the brush, moves it against the floor, and work is
done. But this moving wave of motion and compression is simply sound, and
if my pole is wood (carved from a very tall tree!), then the wave of
"work" moves at the speed of sound in wood. Whether I scrub back and
forth or just give a single push, the "work" moves down the pole at the
speed of sound.

But... this means that mechanical energy.... is the same as SOUND! I
can't hear it because the frequency at which I push the brush is deeply
subsonic. (If I pushed it back and forth 100 times a second, I might hear
my "work" as a humming sound that escapes from the pole.) Or if I should
push the pole constantly ahead instead of back and forth, then it's even
"DC" sound instead of "AC" sound. But even if I pull the brush backwards
at a constant rate, there is still "something" moving from my arm, rapidly
through the pole, to the distant scrub-brush. If I push and pull the pole
fast enough, there will be no mistake that I am actually broadcasting
sound waves along the pole and to the distant brush.

Being in electronics, I automatically want to plot all this on a frequency
graph. In the middle of my graph I place normal sound (30HZ to 20KHZ),
and below this, I place NOT subsonic sound, but instead "mechanical
energy" or "work." At 0HZ I place "constant motion", and above zero I
place "long and short pulse motions and oscillating motions".

Too weird. "Work" is at the bottom of the acoustic spectrum.

Returning to the automobile drive shaft, I see that its twisting and
rotation is also a type of sound. Solids are able to support transverse
sound waves as well as longitudinal waves, so the work/sound which flows
from engine to tires within the drive shaft is torsional sound waves of
zero frequency. Well, not exactly zero, since the spectrum of this
sound/work is that of a minutes-long or hours-long pulse.

Work/sound arises everywhere. If I grab a chair and lift it, the wood in
my hand moves first, then it pulls the next bit of wood which moves, which
pulls the next, and eventually the whole chair is rising. But the work I
performed was broadcast to all parts of the chair as sound, as subsonic
energy which travels at the speed of sound in wood.

This can't be the whole story, since it doesn't apply to situations where
no energy is flowing, right? For example, a moving mass has no twist or
stretch, so there is no sound (even "DC sound") involved. Or, a
compressed spring has no motion, so work/sound is not moving within it.
But this is familiar to me. Sound waves contain both compression and
movement, both KE and PE. At nonzero frequency we can say that sound and
mechanical energy are the same. But at zero frequency, we have a sort of
breaking of symmetry, and the very slow "sound wave" oscillation slows to
a stop, and can end up exclusively as motion, or exclusively as
compression. So, the mechanical KE and PE concepts connect directly to
the rest of the above, they are simply the dual facets of sound waves.
Both a mass at a height and a spinning flywheel can appear on my sound
spectrum. They exist at 0hz.

So, all this was hiding in the plot of the sound spectrum all along. It
was just mislabled "subsonic" or "infrasonic" where it should have said
"work" or "mechanical energy." I wonder, is there anything weird on the
spectrum in the
other direction? Ultrasound, hypersound, what's up there? In a physics
encyclopedia on "Hypersonics" I find an interesting tidbit. If we send
sound waves through a solid object, and raise the frequency higher and
higher, something interesting happens. The speed of sound decreases as
the wavelength shortens, and it becomes about zero when the wavelength
equals the crystal lattice spacing. There is a classic demo of this, with
an air track and a row of carts connected by springs. If the end cart is
wiggled too fast, the spreading zone of "wiggle" moves through the line of
carts very
slowly. HMMMM! High-frequency sound that oozes through solids like
syrup, where the sound is stuck as standing waves between individual atoms
of the material, and where individual atoms seem large and so cause
scattering of the waves. If a chunk of solid is "infected" with this
intensely
loud, slowly moving hypersound, and if another piece of solid should touch
it, the slow hypersound will ooze into the other object until (if the
objects are equal in size and composition), the sound occupies twice the
volume and is
everywhere half as loud.

So, heat is sound? Or should I say that "heat" is sound? Temperature is
something vaguely like the volume control on a stereo? Thermal energy
within objects is actually a very loud screech of hypersonic whitenoise?

My scrub-brush from before, when it dragged across the floor, must have
"twanged" the individual atoms in the floor and in the bristles, and the
resulting sound frequency was so high that it flowed slowly into the floor
and into the bristles. Work/sound was converted to heat/sound by rubbing,
in the same way that a slow subsonic movement of a fingernail can be
converted to high frequency noise, if that fingernail moves across the
teeth of a comb. Nonlinear atomic stick-and-slip joins the realm of
work/sound with the realm of heat/sound.

Being on a roll, I look around for other things to "unify." Thermal
energy isn't really so simple, since atoms can transmit energy as IR
photons as well as transmitting it via this incoherent hypersound method.
I wonder, is the frequency of the photons the same as the frequency of
the "heat vibrations"? I don't know. I suspect that it is. Anyway, look
closer at those atoms. One atom vibrating in a warm solid can bash
another, which bashes a couple neighbors, and "heat" so travels as sound
waves. But one atom can also bash just the electron shell of another
atom rather than bashing the atom as a whole...

Ignore photons and think of waves. Atoms whose electrons and nucleii do
not move as one single object are going to generate electrostatic fields
and magnetic fields. If an atom wiggles like a single solid billiard
ball, it can wiggle its neighbors through its chemical bonds and transmit
sound. But if the atom's electrons and protons wiggle separately out of
phase, then e/m fields of just that same frequency are broadcast, and they
can wiggle a distant atom's electrons and protons separately. I still
haven't found out if the sound spectrum of "heat" has the same general
frequency distribution as the IR thermal spectrum, but I've convinced
myself that it probably is very similar. Thermal vibration can move as
*mechanical* wiggles of charges in phase, or as *field* wiggles coming
from plus and minus charges that wiggle out of phase. When the opposite
charges wiggle in phase, its called "sound", and when they wiggle with
non-zero phase, it's called "electromagnetism."

Hold on there. This applies to wires! So, what if I replace my 100KM
wooden pole with a 100KM copper bar? If I had a way to push on just the
copper protons without pushing on the electrons (or maybe vice versa),
would I do work and send a wave of electromagnetic compression-wave
"work/sound" along the rod? This wouldn't be purely an EM wave, because
it would be connected with real physical particles. As before, if I push
the electrons and protons together as one, I move physical matter and
produce sound (and maybe mechanical work,) but if I push the
electron-stuff separately from the proton-stuff in the copper, I get some
sort of travelling compression wave in the electron-sea of the rod. And so
sound and electromagnetism are conceptually joined inside matter. If
matter was entirely made of totally neutral particles, maybe there would
be "mechanical/acoustic" and "electromagnetic" realities which existed
separately and never interacted.

One problem with the above electron-pushing is that to move the
electron-stuff of an object requires immense values of potential. Once I
calculated the voltage involved with pushing the electrons a few cm
without pushing the protons too. (Assume a capacitor where you've moved
Avegadro's number of electrons across a capacitor with a few picofarads
value.) There is a common solution to this problem: connect the wire
into a circle. Then it becomes possible to push the electron-sea along
like a drive-belt without having to create separated charges.

So, rather than using a 100KM copper rod, I use a pair of parallel 100KM
copper rods, with the ends joined at both distant end locations. I want
to push the electron sea, so I stick a motor at one end of the rods, and a
generator at the other. Now, if I suddenly start cranking the motor, I
push electrons into one rod and suck them from the other. A wave of
"work", of compression and motion, starts at my end, travels along the
rods, and ends up at the far end, where it moves the generator. Does the
wave of "work" move at the speed of light? I don't know. Electrons have
nonzero mass, so I would think that it moves a bit slower than c.
Regardless, I'd better make my rods a million KM long, so that it takes a
few seconds for my "work" done on the generator shaft to appear on the
distant motor shaft.

(Aside: wouldn't it be cool to build a simulator that did this? Have two
motor/generators each connected to a separate programmable power supply,
with a computer measuring the current and back-emf, and simulating a
long wire with a one-second propagation delay between the two? With
impedance mismatches and all?)

Electromagnetic sound/work/stuff can travel along wires like work/sound
moves through a drive-belt system. If I look closely, I'll find
populations of compressed electrons and rarefied electrons generating
e-fields, and populations of moving electrons generating b-fields. If I
wiggle the DC generator shaft instead of turning slowly, I send "sound
wave" electromagnetism from one end to the other. People call this e/m
sound-stuff "electricity", as in "kilowatt hours of electricity", or
"quantity of electricity sold by the electric company." The electric
company sells compression waves that travel along a pair of long metal
rods.

But I've heard that there's something else I can do. If I wiggle my DC
generator shaft and make a nice AC wave, and if I connect a 1/4 wavelength
dipole antenna to the other end of my two rods, then the travelling
compression-wave energy from the generator will flow into the antenna and
fly right out into space as radio waves! If I want to do this by wiggling
the generator crank at 5 times per second, I just need a long antenna, a
few thousand KM. If I ignore the electrons and the wires for a moment,
and concentrate only on the fields surrounding them, I see something
interesting. When I wiggle the generator shaft, e-fields and b-fields
race out of the generator, surround the pair of wires, then race outwards
along them. They move as waves, at the frequency of my wiggling. When
they get to the antenna, they pour out into space as EM waves disconnected
from any charged particles. By using an antenna, I've removed the
obscuring electron/proton concepts, and discovered that the "mechanical"
work that travels around in any electric circuit is the exact same thing
as radio waves! The "work" I do in wiggling that generator shaft is now
flying out into space not as sound, but as EM ripples.

So, I drag out a plot of the electromagnetic spectrum, and below the AM
band I find ELF, VLF, ULF, etc. radio waves. Just like with the acoustic
spectrum, I find that this is wrong. I can cross out all this stuff, and
in its place write "Electricity". (In quotes, because of the particular
definition of the word.) When the electric company sends "electricity"
from its generators to my home, they are sending radio waves. The
"electricity" sold by the electric company sits at 60HZ on the radio
spectrum, 50HZ in Europe. Our culture is truly a radio culture, with
everything run by radio waves being ducted along the wires. But no one
tells us this. Sounds like a Nikola Tesla hallucination, no? (I've heard
that Tesla himself picked the 60Hz value.) When I talk into a telephone,
radio waves between 100HZ and 5KHZ race outwards in the space around the
phone lines. If I interrupt the pair of wires with a transformer, the
waves flow right across the gap. If I connect hundreds of 1:1
transformers end to end, I get more of a proper idea of the sort of energy
that's flowing along that "drive belt" of electrons. And if I could put a
big enough antenna on the distant ends of those telephone wires, I would
need no transmitter. The audio-frequency "electricity" would flow right
out into space. When my stereo system sends "stuff" along the pair of
wires to the distant loudspeakers, the "stuff" is ELF radio waves between
40HZ and 15KHZ (more, if audiophile equipment!)

(Note: I did find that a wall chart of the Electromagnetic Spectrum
published by the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco DOES show 60hz
electric energy transmission in the appropriate spot.)

And following the lure of 0HZ, I look at my flashlight and conceptually I
see a spinning drive shaft that has a small twist. Zero-frequency
electromagnetic sound/work/stuff flows from the battery and into the bulb,
where it is converted (by the electromagnetic version of a nonlinear
stick/slip fingernails-on-comb-teeth effect!) into thermal/electromagnetic
waves! Rub a brush on the floor, and the floor fills with hypersound, rub
the electron-sea of a metal against its proton sea, and "hypersonic"
(meaning IR) electromagnetic waves bounce around inside. EM is different
from sound in this case, since the EM can get out of the hot metal as
waves of fields in vacuum, whereas the hypersound can't use vacuum as its
medium.

And finally, back to the compressed spring and the flywheel. When a ring
of metal has its electron-stuff moving while its proton-stuff stays still,
we have a magnet. When the electron-stuff of a metal is compressed and
the proton-stuff isn't (or vice-versa), we have e-fields, separated
charge, "Static Electricity". (I hate that word, it should be
'electricism', so it can unite with 'magnetism' correctly in our heads:
e-fields and b-fields.) The dual halves of mechanical work/sound stuff,
when at zero frequency, gives us PE and KE; compressed springs and
spinning flywheels. They are parts of sound, but at zero frequency, with
symmetry broken. The the dual halves of the work/EM-stuff gives us coils
and capacitors, electromagnetic PE and KE, magnets and "electrets." These
are the broken symmetry of frozen radio waves.

As a result of the above, I'm no longer so sure that "heat" is such a bad
word. If we bar the use of "heat", should we not also bar the use of
"sound" and "light"? Maybe we just need to coin a term that's a bit more
specific than "heat". A term that indicates the "thermal-stuff" that
flows around; the sum of the broadband infrared radiation and the
incoherent hypersound inside objects. (The modern version of Phlogiston?)

......................uuuu / oo \ uuuu........,.............................
William Beaty voice:206-781-3320 bbs:206-789-0775 cserv:71241,3623
EE/Programmer/Science exhibit designer http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/
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