Re: [Phys-l] energy is well defined.

[Rick Tarara <rtarara@saintmarys.edu>]

John,

Any particular reason you leave mass energy out of your list of examples--or 
electromagnetic energy? Both seem to be 'basic'--more so than capacitive or 
inductive energy.  Your approach certainly leads to something Philip 
Morrison uses in his "Ring of Truth' episode on change---mass = energy.  Of 
course this doesn't help much for anyone struggling for a definition of 
mass.

Now of course we can also conjure up 'mind energy' or 'thought energy' IF we 
could get a verifiable example of telekinesis!  ;-)

It is also pretty hard to imagine anyway to meet your challenge about 'not 
well defined' energy since all you have to do is show that somehow whatever 
is in question can be converted to something you 'define' to be energy--as I 
have above!  ;-)

Rick

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Denker" <jsd@av8n.com>


> Referring probably to
>  http://www.av8n.com/physics/thermo-laws.htm#sec-workability
>
> On 02/17/2008 10:44 PM, Ken Fox wrote:
> >  2 hot potatoes can do more
> > work as long as we keep the cold one as well, I think.
>
> Well, yes, you can do that if you want, but then it becomes
> a different experiment.  Both experiments are OK, but we
> need to keep track of which is which.
>
> I just now added the words "and nothing else" to clarify the
> description of my two-potato heat engine.
>
>
> > I am still looking for the well defined statement of energy, suitable for 
> > my
> > neophytes,
>
> The best I can do is:
>  http://www.av8n.com/physics/thermo-laws.htm#sec-energy-def
>
> It's less than 175 words.  It's not super-simple or super-concise,
> but it has served me well all these years.  It's an operational
> definition, optimized more for practicality than elegance.
>
> I just now re-arranged this part of the document, putting the
> definition _per se_ into its own section, and moving the /remarks/
> about the definition into separate sections.