Friday, March 14, 2008

Physics 101

Just a quick note to keep you guessing.

There is a law of physics that says that energy is constant. It is the law of "conservation of energy".

This law tells us that energy cannot be created, it can change forms but it can be neither created nor destroyed.

For instance you take a ball and place it at the top of the ramp. It takes a certain amount of energy to place the ball at the top of the ramp. When the ball is at the top of the ramp, the ball has all that energy stored. As it goes down the ramp the energy is released in the motion of the ball.

My question has always been, where did the energy go?

Now lets blow this way out of proportion.

At this very moment humans are 'consuming' vast quantities of stored energy in the form of fossil fuels, wind, solar, nuclear and hydro power.

But the law of the conservation of energy says that the energy was not 'consumed' but rather changed form, or was dissipated.

So where did it go?

There is another law, "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction"

Now I don't know if there is a law about this or not, but Superman used to fly around the world backwards, so fast that he would change the rotation of the earth and time would reverse.

He was using energy (that he got from our yellow sun) and expending it in such a way that it was reversing the rotation (re-storing the energy) and then for some reason we all went back in time....

So can we do that?

If we all jumped in our cars and drove to the west at the same time, would it have an effect on the earth's rotation?

What effect does it have on the earth's rotation anyhow, even when we aren't all going in the same direction? Or on the earth itself?

Think about the trillions of watts of power we as humans switch from the stored form into a heating/cooling/moving form..... per hour!



And as you think about that.... here is another puzzle to ponder:



1 comment:

V4Vagabond said...

Well Mountainman, I've been driving west since the end of January and I've been wondering if that would have the effect of slowing the earth's eastward rotation and would that slow the rotation of the earth around the sun? And would that mean that spring wouldn't come as early this year? So in my westward search for spring am I actually delaying it? Ohhhhh Nooooooo!!!!!
V4Vagabond