Walross

Thanks for the excerpt Lobstrosity. My problem is that I was thinking of Rayleigh scattering as the light literally "bouncing" off the particles of the upper atmosphere, when really it's being absorbed and re-radiated. My bad.

Walross

and now back to our regularly scheduled discussion of black holes and relativity...

Shadowy Man

Go outside with a pair of polarized sunglasses sometime and look around the sky! Very cool.

deano

ok i understand all of that,thanks.

a few more questions-

when atoms vibrate,do they release energy in the form of thermal radiation??,is this the same principle as accelerating particles radiating?

and if you could be so kind as to explain energy conservation because google only seems to come up with heating bill reduction methods .i only briefly came upon when it was mentioned in einstiens work about electrons collapsing into the nucleus of atoms if energy conservation didnt exist.

Feather

Vibrating atoms release electromagnetic radiation as implied above, because atoms are composed of charged particles. The particles are massive, so they also release gravitational radiation, but in amounts much too small to measure. So it is the same principle.

Energy conservation is a statement of an observation that has been reaffirmed countless times over the last four centuries of physics exploration. It is a simple statement: in a closed system, the total energy is a constant (unknown except by measurment, obviously). This doesn't mean the distribution of energy is constant (e.g. in a two particle system one particle could have 10% of the energy and the other 90% of the energy and some time later the energy may be split 50-50). It's very general and abstract and perhaps the most useful principle after the superposition principle.

DaveGE

Try a search on "conservation of energy" or "law of conservation of energy". Also you might try "thermodynamics".

HTH. HAND.

--
Dave