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Consider a thunderstorm, nature’s best display of electric energy. Through complicated collisions and Sisyphean updrafts within the storm, particles with negative charges are driven toward the cloud base, with positive charges accumulating near the top. This separation creates a large electric potential difference (voltage) between the cloud base and the ground below, because the ground often becomes positively charged in response.…
I once saw a magazine ad claiming a magnetic bracelet would heal my pain. Conveniently for the seller, the bracelet was also expensive. Proponents of this “ionized jewelry” claim these magnets can improve blood flow, reduce pain and balance your body’s energy fields.…
First, internal energy (U) is the sum of all forms of microscopic energy in a system. It includes all the kinetic energy (the motions, rotations, and vibrations) of tiny particles and all the potential energy of those particles interacting with each other. Think of Pandora’s box (in the original myth, it’s a jar, not a box!) rollicking with buzzing, sparking, invisible particles of evil and mischief inside.…
Whether it’s a screech, a squeal, a squeak, or a much more pleasant sound—a violin bow rubbing across a string is another stick-slip example—sound energy is a form of mechanical energy that travels through a medium (usually air, water or solid objects) as a wave.…
Actually, a Fourth of July picnic in the park with family, friends and neighbors presents the perfect scenario to think about all the ways we use chemical potential energy without even thinking about it. On a deeper level, the bonds we chemically make or break—and maybe make again—are reflected in the bonds we create or destroy with other people, locally and nationally.…
When you compress a spring, like the one in the click mechanism of a ballpoint pen, you’re using the force (the physics version, F = -kx, not the “Star Wars” version, sorry) to push the spring in, and this force, exerted over a distance, gives you work—which, as we covered in February, is measured in the same units as energy: joules.…
Iron String Press is the sole remaining independent and locally owned newspaper publishing enterprise in Otsego County. Through its print publications and its digital counterpart, AllOtsego.com, Otsego County households have the benefit of local news in local hands at a time when the U.S. is losing an average of more than two community newspapers each week.…
Potential energy is the energy stored in an object because of its position, condition or state. It’s the energy of anticipation, the calm before the storm, the coil in the spring, the water held back by the dam, the double-A battery fresh from the factory, the caterpillar before the butterfly, that butterfly and all his friends and relatives in your stomach right before the roller coaster’s plunge.…
As a pioneering philosopher-mathematician in France, Émilie Du Châtelet argued, as Leibniz did, that a fundamental quantity of motion existed beyond the idea of momentum, which she called the force morte, “the dead force”...…
I find a great deal of value in contemplating both the physical and metaphysical—dare I say spiritual—forms of work, so we’ll have fun blending them here.…