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    Energy, Third Edition
    Energy, Third Edition
    Energy, Third Edition
    Ebook133 pages1 hour

    Energy, Third Edition

    By Sophia Chen and Andrew Dean Foland

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    About this ebook

    Praise for the previous edition:

    "...presents a great deal of very useful information in a concise and entertaining way...a wonderful addition to a science classroom library or useful as reference or enrichment material..."—NSTA Recommends

    Energy is the central concept of physics. Unable to be created or destroyed but transformable from one form to another, energy ultimately determines what is and isn't possible in our universe. Energy, Third Edition gives readers an appreciation for the limits of energy and the quantities of energy in the world around them. This fascinating eBook explores the major forms of energy: kinetic, potential, electrical, chemical, thermal, and nuclear. Each succinct chapter is centralized around a single quantity of energy—for instance, the potential energy in Lady Liberty's torch or the chemical energy in a bag of sugar—making Energy, Third Edition a uniquely engaging resource for physics students.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChelsea House
    Release dateSep 1, 2021
    ISBN9781646937332
    Energy, Third Edition

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      Book preview

      Energy, Third Edition - Sophia Chen

      title

      Energy, Third Edition

      Copyright © 2021 by Infobase

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information, contact:

      Chelsea House

      An imprint of Infobase

      132 West 31st Street

      New York NY 10001

      ISBN 978-1-64693-733-2

      You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web

      at http://www.infobase.com

      Contents

      Chapters

      What Is Energy?

      Kinetic Energy

      Potential Energy

      Heat Energy

      Electrical Energy

      Chemical Energy

      Nuclear Energy

      Energy and Humans

      Conclusion

      Support Materials

      Glossary

      Bibliography

      About the Authors

      Index

      Chapters

      What Is Energy?

      Everyone has heard of energy. We know it is related to the cars we drive, the lights we turn on at night, and the food we cook for dinner. Most of us feel that it is somehow related to power. We also use the word energy to describe a person (very energetic) or vague feelings (for instance, someone might say, I sense an energy here).

      In everyday life, it is perfectly acceptable to use the word energy in these various ways. In physics, though, energy is a precisely defined idea. Unfortunately, it is easy to confuse the everyday meanings of energy with its technical definition. It is also unfortunate that many explanations of energy in physics are either confusing or incorrect.

      So, it will be helpful, first, to make a list of things that are not energy. Most of these things have something to do with energy, but they are not energy. The distinction will make it much easier to understand what energy is.

      Energy is not electricity.

      Energy is not a force.

      Energy is not sunlight.

      Energy is not gasoline.

      Energy is not a fluid.

      Energy is not power.

      Energy is not radiation.

      Energy is not infrared light.

      In short, energy is not a material object at all. Material objects can have or carry energy but are not energy themselves. In this way, energy is sort of like the idea of color: objects have colors, but color is not an object. If you could imagine a slightly kooky bumper-car amusement park ride where the cars could exchange their colors whenever they collided, you would have a good start toward understanding energy. A car might, for instance, carry redness from one place to another, much like light carries energy from one place to another.

      Another common definition of energy is the capacity to do work, where work is defined as a specific physics concept. This definition is largely correct and will give you a fair grasp of the concept, although it is not complete.

      Regardless of what energy is, we will learn in this text how to calculate the amount of energy in many situations—and once you have calculated the amount of energy in a situation, then the total amount of energy calculated must always stay the same, even if the situation changes. That is, the situation is only allowed to change to another situation with the same amount of calculated energy. This is what we mean when we say, Energy is always conserved. According to the law of conservation, energy cannot be created or destroyed—the calculated amount cannot go up or down.

      Energy comes in many forms, but regardless of the form, all forms of energy share the same principles. Nonetheless, the formula used to calculate the amount of energy differs from one situation to another. In the course of this text, we will see many of these forms: from the fundamental definition of energy to mechanical energy, potential energy, heat energy, electrical energy, chemical energy, and nuclear energy.

      Let us now return to the question of what energy is. It would be fairest to say, Energy is a useful number that you can calculate in any physics situation, and the total number will never change thereafter. This is a little unsatisfying if you were hoping for a statement like energy is a fluid or energy is the motion of little tiny particles. Unfortunately, energy is an abstract quantity, and a slightly absurd and complicated one at that. As the theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli is rumored to have said, Just shut up and calculate! It is useful to recall the words of the great Richard Feynman, in his book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter:

      It is not a question of whether a theory is philosophically delightful, or easy to understand, or perfectly reasonable from the point of view of common sense. The theory … describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment.

      All that said, though, if you feel cheated in learning what energy is, you can fall back on our earlier statement, Energy is the capacity to do work.

      Mathematician Emmy Noether (1882-1935) proved that if the laws of physics do not change from day to day, then energy must be conserved.

      Source: Wikimedia Commons.

      You might wonder, then, Why does the amount of energy never change? This has a somewhat cleaner answer. The physicist Emmy Noether proved that if the laws of physics are the same today as they were yesterday, then the energy must be conserved.¹ So, the amount of energy never changes from one situation to another because the laws of physics do not change from day to day. This fact is by no means obvious—figuring it out is why Noether became famous.

      Measuring Energy

      You may understand intuitively that a speeding truck has more energy than a butterfly does, or that a gallon of gasoline can provide more energy to a car than a gallon of water would. But how are these energies measured? We seldom have an energy meter that reads out the answer. Usually the energy of an object is calculated from quantities such as the object's speed, mass, or position.

      Just as length is measured in feet or meters, and time is measured in seconds, energy must also be measured in some system of units. There are four common units in use for measuring energy—we will encounter three of them in this text, and the fourth (BTU) is commonly used in everyday life. The official energy unit of the SI system (the International System of Units, now used for most scientific purposes) is the joule (abbreviated J). One joule is twice as much as the mechanical energy (described in the next unit) carried by a one-kilogram object moving at one meter per second. One joule is about the amount of energy you exert in lifting a cup of water from the table to your mouth.

      Another unit of energy, which we will use very little in the text, is the calorie. The definition of a calorie is the amount of energy that will raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. One calorie is approximately 4.2 joules. A more commonly

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