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At 15:43 3/9/01 -0500, Peter Schoch wrote:
I have just had a student ask an intriguing question (at least to me).
Unfortunately, I have no idea how to answer him, so I'm asking for help.
His question, cleaned up a bit, had to do with Lenz's Law for
Induction. He wanted to know if somehow it was tied to the idea in
thermodynamics that no "engine" could be 100% efficient. His reasoning
was that if The induced current wasn't in opposition to the inducing
flux, we could create a perpetual motion machine which would violate
entropy.
Now, I have never linked these two concepts together before. At first
blush it seems reasonable, but I don't feel comfortable enough with
either concept to say it is "definitively" so.
Any comments would be appreciated.
Peter Schoch
SCCC
There is a deep cussedness, call it a principle if you like,
seen in physics, chemistry and other fields,
which I could put bluntly like this:
If you push something, it tends to push back. You could say this is an
energy extracting process.
If it happened that there are things which if pushed, help the push
along, it would be easy to construe this as a positive feedback, or
energy supplying process. I have a deep prejudice that if I see an
energy sink I expect to find, sometime, somewhere, an associated
energy supplying mechanism.
If there were no such link, I would suspect a perpetual motion.
You will not take it amiss, I'm sure that I have my personal
prejudices and belief systems.
I see a tenuous connection between this theme, and a somewhat comparable
debating piece: let's suppose there is an object containing something
which I will call 'Ergic Fluid' (As I have every right to do.)
I will describe an action which can in fact share this Ergic Fluid
in almost any desired proportion between the original object,
the medium through which the object is made to move, and its final
target object.
If I offer this scenario to people who tend to see a particular class
of problems in black and white terms, and who moreover abhor the use
of certain terms, as it might be "fluid" or "Ergic" or "flow" or
"supply" or "sink" or "dissipation" (as you can see, the possibilities
are endless...) then I have all the ingredients for some splendid
posturing, argumentation and righteous indignation.
..Or am I being unhelpful ...again? :-)
brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net> Altus OK
Eureka!