Peter Vajk essentially asked if JMGreen might just be transferring or
postponing reification of energy by passing it onto work. I was
thinking that also. The first thing I noticed with Jim's original
question was that he never mentioned gravitational potential energy at
the beginning of his sequence of events leading to the temperature of
some water increasing. Was that just a word game to avoid saying that
the energy of the system was originally in the form of GPE, and through
a series of events the GPE of the weights decreased and the thermal
energy of the water increased, and thus within the system the energy
converted or transferred from one form to another?
In the bigger picture I guess I don't understand what's wrong with
talking about the components of a model as if the components were real?
Energy is a concept... so what? If the model (in which the concept of
energy is used) describes energy as flowing, and if the model has proven
and is proving useful, then so what?
More generally, what does it mean when we say words like <something>
<flows> <from one place to another>?
I broke that into three bracketed portions so we can discuss each
portion separately. What is the <something>? Does it have to be
tangible; something we can hold in our hand? Does <flow> require a
fluid entity?
Let's start with <from one place to another> and <something>. Can we
identify location-1 where <something> is or begins, and another
location-2 where <something> originally wasn't, but by some mechanism
eventually arrives? If we do that, did the <something> flow or travel
from location-1 to location-2. Can this only happen if <something> is
real? If the <something> did get from one place to another, is it
improper to say it <flowed> if the <something> was not a fluid? Can
same <something> travel by different methods?
Let's take an intangible non-physics <something>... news. Does news
travel? We generally say it does. "News travels through the
grapevine." Now there's a double non-real description... news is not
tangible (it's just mental) and it certainly doesn't get from one place
to another by grape vines. Yet almost everyone beyond a certain age
knows what that phrase means. News can flow through the postal service
where the pieces of paper "containing the news" literally flow through
the sorting machines and end up getting from some origin to your
mailbox. News can travel by waves whether old fashioned (ship-to-ship
signaling lanterns) or more modern radios of various types.
Are we going to suggest that people shouldn't talk of news traveling
because the only things that can travel are tangible things?
Energy in the form of mass in hydrogen atoms in the sun eventually ends
up arriving at earth as electromagnetic waves. Are we going to say
energy didn't travel from there to here? Is it wrong to say solar
energy flows from the sun to earth?
If we embark on a campaign to remove reification from physics education,
and we get too picky about words like "flow," I don't think anything
particulalry good will come from it, and useful analogies will be lost.
If we are sticklers that people should speak more carefully, and
language they find useful should be avoided because that particular
language is not literally true, then the news through the grapevine will
be that physicists are indeed the geeky out-of-it weirdoes that many
people already think we are.
Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D.
Professor of Physics and Chemistry
Bluffton University
Bluffton, OH 45817
(419)-358-3270
edmiston@bluffton.edu