Friday, September 10, 2010

Conservation of Energy and The Nature of Forces

Today I have been toying with a bunch of things:

1) Conservation of energy, I have been writing this section for the book project. Nice approach, if I do say so myself. Did you know that we really don't know what energy is other than a calculated number that remains the same in a closed system? We have no better understanding of energy than that. Despite being able to calculate it, predict it, and use it in other kinds of calculations; we have no idea what energy IS!

2) In Newtonian mechanics the entire game is chasing the forces. We have F=ma, and people think this is the definition of force. No! This states that the numerical quantity of force is equal to the product of mass and acceleration. If you do not know what F is prior to doing a calculation you will not be likely to figure it out.

3) I have been messing around, playing with trigonometric and hyperbolic functions.

Been having a lot of fun with these things.

3 comments:

  1. Finally, some candid admissions about what is not known about energy and force. A timely reminder from a theoretical physicist without an academic portfolio for the professional community (and the rest of us) to ponder.

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  2. Good job. Have fun with hyperbolic functions. A couple of months ago I brushed off my book on Bessel functions for a project I was working on. The project didn't work out but the math of Bessel functions is beautiful.

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  3. Thanks, I like special functions.

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