all energy is movement?
 

hey i just read this from a blog and was wondering if it was ture. all energy is movement. i was hoping someone with a bit more science could explain this better to me.

thanks froggy

I don't think your link is working.

There is no link, but not all energy is movement.

Total Energy = Kinetic Energy (movement) + Potential Energy
From the 1st law of thermodynamics, all energy is conserved.

For example, a ball resting on a slide has no kinetic energy but has potential energy (gravitational). As the ball falls down the slide, the potential energy decreases and kinetic energy increases.

Make sense?

Here's a way of thinking about it.

Potential Energy is the Energy that CAN be released. If you put a ball on a shelf, it has potential energy. Where does it get this energy? You spent energy to get the ball on the shelf by fighting the gravity. This can be released as kinetic energy by falling, at which point the potential will be expelled as kinetic.

Movement is energy because it takes a force to move an atom. Dams work by storing water (potential energy), releasing it at the base where pressure is high (kinetic energy), and using the movement in the water to turn turbines which create electricity (electrical energy).

All of these steps are energy based.

If you want to get more complicated E=mc^2, even atoms and molecules can release energy (LOTS of it). Fission is where nuclei split large molecules into two smaller ones. Fusion can release more energy, our sun fuses Hydrogen atoms together, and we all can see how much energy it creates.

So yes, all movement is energy, however no movement does not mean no energy.

Oops, sorry. I thought there was a link to the blog. I'd be interested to see it, anyway. I wonder, were you reading about string theory?

And yeah, what they said. You can do an energy balance around any movement because it's conserved, and don't forget heat.

I think that if you look close enough, each Btu of energy can be associated with one really, really small ninja.

all movement requires energy. ture? The smaller the entity moved, the less energy required, but then BOOM! It's not physics(yes it is)but it could become powerful poetry(if there is such a thing).

No, it's not true.

If you provide a link to the blog, we might be able to figure out what the author was trying to say.

Maybe potential energy is movement too if you think of gravity as a product of movement within an object (the Earth) that is tapped into when (say) water in a dam is released.

I'm powered by Hatake Kakashi.

I'm powered by Chakra but I need a lot of it...


By the way, this thread would be more appropriate in Tilted Knowledge...

Or maybe Tilted Powers That Be?

So Seaver says its true and CSfilms says no....well, obviously all movement is energy but is all energy movement??? No....if an object had stored potential energy, it has energy but no movement....I Think???

The thing is that to realise the potential energy, yu have to move something - therefore potential energy is movement that has been stored.

Think about how the item gained the potential energy - it gained it by being moved to a high shelf, or the top of the ladder. Either way there was movement to get the energy into the system.

Thermal energy is atomic vibration.
Chemical energy is associated with electron location and consequently the movement of electrons.
Electrical energy is electron flow.
Kinetic energy is moving masses.

If you allow for the special case of potential energy being stored movement leading to stored energy, then YES all energy is movement.

Saying all energy is movement is at the best extremely misleading; I would be more inclined to call it incorrect. Potential energy depends on the arrangement of a system. Sure moving things around changes the potential energy but this movement isn't the energy itself. It's not only the movement but also the charge or the mass of the object, depending on the situation, which comes into play to determine the change in energy. Then you have something like a photon whose energy depends only on the wavelength. So there's movement involved but that's really a given seeming that without movement the universe would be a rather static place.

I guess that if you exclude potential energy, this is roughly the case. Or - given that the equation is not simply E=v... lets say that energy is associated with movement - bit it vibration, rotation or tranlation.

My tertiary physics is rusty though. Probably some better educated TFPer (or just a smarter person) will see a flaw. And shit... I never mastered general relativity, so I'm just a dumbo.

At the same time also... objects gain mass as they gain energy (yes?). Couldn't you just as easily claim that all energy is mass? Quantum Mech. "teaches" us not to read too much into the equations. At the end of the day - the universe is more complex than our basic analogies. IMHO that is.