Deimos

Let's play some more. Corwin, what does the gravitaitonal field, acting through the soon-to-be-famous Corwin Mechanism, do to the individual atoms of our 1 kg mass?

What was that energy transfer again?

Corwin

Human labels... nothing more. It's all energy and it can all convert from one form to another. What's so difficult to understand about this? What happens when lightning strikes? How much electrical energy is left? None. Where does it all go? It converts to heat and light. Some of it arcs into the surrounding environment and ionizes the matter in that area... in the process of which it either decays into heat, or the electrons bond onto other atoms during the ionization process. (If negative ions are being produced)

Pantera

You obviously cared enough about it that it made you forget to use that damned smiley.

NOGO

Right! Anything that can't support the rock will be crushed. Anything that cannot exert the force to neutralize the force exerted between the rock and the earth. So how does this help you.

Once the rock stops moving it feels zero force. No force, no movement, therefore no kinetic energy.

Can you please point to research which has established that gravity transfers energy.
Einstein's theory was that matter distorts the space around it. NO transfer of energy.
Photons are deviated from their trajectory in such a distorted space. Since photons have no mass there is no gravity. Now this theory does have its problems. It creates singularities, but the point is that there is no transfer of energy. This is the magical way that two stellar bodies orbit one another.

So where do you get all of this. Please point to papers and research which you have read.

Protons and electronics also orbit each other. The forces here are electric and magnetic which are much larger than gravity. Are you saying that larger quantities of energy are exchanged? Why then is this not the main source of heat?

Tim Thompson

I've long since lost track of what you guys think you are arguing about. But since it's Friday, and I don't have to come back for a few days, I thought I would just stick my nose right in there.

First, you can never extract energy from a pressurized system, without changing the pressure, or you immediately violate the principle of conservation of energy. This should be fairly easy to see. If the pressure is the source of the energy that causes the temperature, and you extract energy from the system via its temperature, and the pressure does not change, then you have a perpetual motion machine, and that doesn't work. Energy always has to come from somewhere.

Second, you certainly can convert gravitational energy into thermal energy, inside a planet, or inside a star. The mechanism is gravitational settling. The heavier stuff sinks down and the light stuff rises up. The heat energy comes from simple friction as the "fluids" flow through each other. But the settling of material also lowers the gravitational potential. This won't be evident if you use the simple form of the potential (U = -GMm/r), because it depends only on M, which does not change. But that's not a valid formulation for the potential of a solid sphere (or non-sphere), which has an uneven distribution of mass internally. The potential in that case is a spherical harmonic expansion, which depends on the spatial distribution, and velocity of motion, of material internal to the body.

I repeat a paragraph from my post on page 1:

"About 25% of the earth's interior heat comes from radioactive decay. The remaining 75% is a combination of heat left over from formation of the earth, and heat generated by the condensation of the liquid outer core onto the solid inner core (ref: Gravitational energy of core evolution: implications for thermal history and geodynamo power, F.D. Stacey & C.H.B Stacey, Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors 110(1-2): 83-93, January, 1999)"

A part of that 75% is potential energy released by settling, but I don't know how significant it is for the earth (I know it is significant for Jupiter & Saturn). That settling of mass towards the center lowers the gravitational potential. But the heating will last only as long as the settling does. Once the settling stops, so does the heating.

These changes in earth's gravitational potential are measureable, both in principle & in practice, by virtue of precision satellite tracking. Tiny bumps in the orbit are caused by higher harmonics in the gravitational field. The <a href="http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/" target="_blank">Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment</a> (GRACE) will launch next week. GRACE consists of twin satellites that will fly in formation, and perform inter-satellite laser ranging, as well as gound tracking. They will plot changes in the earth's gravitational field, every 30 days, and claim to be sensitive to changes resulting from water table variations. May not be as sensitive to longer term changes from internal settling, especially since it's only a 5-year mission.

GunnerJ

Pot, kettle, black.

After two pages of slandering everyone who disagrees with you as asserting that pressure has NO effect on the Earth's core, it amazes me that you can make a comment like this, and indeed carry a smirk through with it. You are indeed a black hole of intellectual integrity.

[ March 08, 2002: Message edited by: Rimstalker ]</p>

Baloo

Ah, but Tim, you miss the crux of Corwin's problem. Ya see, in the WW of Corwin, we don't need FRICTION to get energy. Wherever there is a force, energy just starts being there. Because, you see, force is energy, in Corwin's world. Why are we arguing about rocks on the table? Because Corwin is so delusional that he thinks that a rock sitting on a table will just start heating the table up. The reason why is so fucking simple, that if you don't understand it, you are a complete moron. After all, reasons Corwin, if you drop a boulder on your head, it hurts, and so of course a rock on a table is going to heat it up. This is the irrefutable evidence we are presented with. I shit you not. Did I mention that an object at rest can actually be accelerating in Corwin's world (as long as it is held against something with the force of gravity). You see, not only is force and energy the same thing in Corwin's world, but force and acceleration are the same thing. I also think that pressure and energy seem to be the same thing, and by extension, we must be able to measure pressure somehow in units of meters/second^2. Anyway, I'd like to suggest a poll: who thinks Corwin is trolling?

GunnerJ

Change that last word to "tripping" and I'll give you an answer.

Sadly, I think he's serious. He's so serious about his "energy=force=acceleration=pressure" magick that he spends six pages scribbling out lame science by analogy; distorting his opponents' positions into bizzare extremes, then accusing others of distorting his position, and then complaining about their bias for not agreeing with him, and then calling them "anal-retentive" for having the gall to insist on proper terminology being used in a technical discussion; playing the martyr for an unpopular cause; whining about how he can't come up with evidence, and then using "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" to prove that his unevidenced assertions are correct; and then accusing his oppenents of being just like fundie/creationists for blindly following scientific dogma, thus assuming the fundie/creationist tactic of calling science another religion. And his does it all with the empty, false self-confidence of a smiley wearing sunglasses, and after his argument is repeatedly refuted and flogged to death, he uses the old "I don't care what you all think, you stink, and I'm taking my ball and going home" ruse. No, he's dead serious, but he's also dead to critical thought. Kind of sad, really.

Synaesthesia

Goes to show that creationists are not the only ones who spout quarter-understood, second-hand rhetoric. Only can the brilliance of man's mind produce such idiocy.

(apologies for sexist language.)

Corwin

You two have simply proven several times here that you're incapable of any sort of rational thought or dialog. You've taken my arguments and distorted them to the point where even I don't recognize them anymore. You've made me out to be some frothing lunatic that believes in magic. Now, when confronted with someone who at least partially agrees with me, you get defensive. I see how this is.... it isn't as much fun when you don't have overwhelming numbers on your hands is it now?

All of this is beside the point. THe fact remains, my argument stands. You can get on my case about absurd extreme distortions of my arguments and attacks on other theory I happen to accept, and you don't. All of it is pretty much irrelevant.