re:Flow of energy

[William Beaty <billb@eskimo.com>]

On Tue, 2 Sep 1997, Leigh Palmer wrote:

> You can paint a rocket green and send it to the Moon. Can you now say
> that green flows? The paint may be said to flow; its color does not
> flow, even though somehow green has been transported over distance -
> there is now more green on the Moon than there was before the rocket
> arrived. (I discount reports that the Moon is made of green cheese.)

I'd have to disagree.  It may sound funny, but my understanding of the
world MIGHT force me to say that yes, green flowed to the moon.  However,
first we must answer the question: is green a CONSERVED property? 
Conserved properties are substance-like.  Push them down in one place,
they pop up somewhere else, and we say that a "flow" took place in
between. 

> From what I know of "green", it is not a conserved quantity.  Tune your
dyes a bit differently, and "green" can vanish, and the dyes can become
transparent to all visible light.

Another example: *charge* is simply a property of matter.  If I place a
charge on the rocket and send it to the moon, was there a flow of charge? 
I could say no, since charge is merely a property of matter, and there is
no way to send pure charge to the moon.  But I prefer to say yes, that
there was a flow of charge, this because charge is conserved and we
should be allowed to say that conserved quantities can "flow."

Mass is merely a property of matter.  If we are disallowed from saying
that properties can flow, then, we should never say that mass can
flow (or even can be transported!)

For that matter, "rocket" is a collection of properties.  So is "matter."
If I'm forbidden from considering the flow of properties, then the very
concept "flow" or "motion" or "transport" is also necessarily forbidden,
no?

> Energy may be an attribute of something that propagates, but there is no
> such thing as pure energy.

But also there is no such thing as pure mass, pure charge, or any other
property that is concerved.  Should we ban "charge flow" as being a
misleading concept, since charge cannot flow, only electrons, protons,
ions, etc. can flow? 

> It seems to be a hard sell, but that's what
> Richard Feynman means when he says there are no blocks. Until that simple
> concept is mastered it is difficult to approach other abstract concepts,
> notably entropy, which is on exactly the same conceptual footing. Entropy
> is easily conceived once energy has been conceived properly.

Maybe so, since I've yet to attain a deeply intuitive understanding of
Entropy.  (However, entropy is not conserved, it can increase without
having to decrease elsewhere, so entropy and energy are entirely different
classes of property.)

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