John T. Nordberg's theory...

[James R]

This is certainly a valid point of view if you believe in conservation of energy as if it were like counting beans. But we don't have an accounting system that is called "conservation of substance", nor is there a conservation law for matter the way there is for energy.

That's right. Mass, for example, is not a conserved quantity in all interactions. But energy is. That's why energy is a useful concept. It works as an accounting system, whereas mass doesn't.

I am well aware, of course, of the sort of loose talk that says "mass is converted to energy in an atomic bomb" and things like that. That is strictly inaccurate. What happens there is that some mass simply disappears, and some other bits of mass end up moving faster than they did before. Also, some other particles appear - like photons, for example. To keep track of all this complexity, it is useful to keep track of an abstract quantity that is conserved in the entire interaction. Again, this is why energy is a useful concept.

The mistake that a lot of people make is to treat like some kind of substance. It isn't a substance. It's just a number. Richard Feynman, the Nobel prize-winning physicist, pointed that out in his famous Lectures on Physics.

Your assertion that "atoms are not energy" is therefore about as inconsistent an accounting system as can possibly be. When matter converts to energy or vice versa, your accounting system doesn't work very well. What kind of science do you claim this is?

I hope it is clear to you by now that I am saying that atoms are certainly not energy. Atoms are made of stuff; they aren't made of numbers. It's a category mistake to claim that anything is "made of energy". Regarding the "conversion" of matter to energy, see above.

And as Farsight keeps pointing out, E=mc^2 works just fine as an accounting system to replace yours.

$$E=mc^2$$ just tells us what particular number to associate with a given amount of rest mass. To think that it is telling you that mass is "made of energy" is a category mistake.

 

[Farsight]

James R : The lecture you're referring to is Feynman lecture 4 : conservation of energy :

4–1 What is energy?
In this chapter, we begin our more detailed study of the different aspects of physics, having finished our description of things in general. To illustrate the ideas and the kind of reasoning that might be used in theoretical physics, we shall now examine one of the most basic laws of physics, the conservation of energy.
There is a fact, or if you wish, a law, governing all natural phenomena that are known to date. There is no known exception to this law—it is exact so far as we know. The law is called the conservation of energy. It states that there is a certain quantity, which we call energy, that does not change in the manifold changes which nature undergoes. That is a most abstract idea, because it is a mathematical principle; it says that there is a numerical quantity which does not change when something happens. It is not a description of a mechanism, or anything concrete; it is just a strange fact that we can calculate some number and when we finish watching nature go through her tricks and calculate the number again, it is the same. (Something like the bishop on a red square, and after a number of moves—details unknown—it is still on some red square. It is a law of this nature.) Since it is an abstract idea, we shall illustrate the meaning of it by an analogy...

...What is the analogy of this to the conservation of energy? The most remarkable aspect that must be abstracted from this picture is that there are no blocks. Take away the first terms in (4.1) and (4.2) and we find ourselves calculating more or less abstract things...

And I'm sorry, but Feynman is wrong. His blocks constitute a straw-man argument. Energy is not some abstract thing, Feynman is contradicting Einstein by claiming it is. And himself too, because later on in that lecture he says this:

...If I have a positron and an electron, standing still doing nothing—never mind gravity, never mind anything—and they come together and disappear, radiant energy will be liberated, in a definite amount, and the amount can be calculated. All we need know is the mass of the object. It does not depend on what it is—we make two things disappear, and we get a certain amount of energy. The formula was first found by Einstein; it is E=mc².

I would urge you to do your own research on this instead of taking lectures for children as gospel truth.

 

[RajeshTrivedi]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_density

Question: "what prevents one from making linear density measurements of the geometry of a curved or spherical object?"

None. In fact cylinder being a curved object can be defined with linear Mass density. Because it's easier for an uniform cylinder as the cross section of the cylinder along the length is same but cross section of a sphere is not same along any radial slice.

But in case of sphere linear Mass density does not offer any help, it becomes a designer sphere, simply because in case of uniform cylinder doubling the length will double the mass but in case of sphere doubling the radius will increase the mass by 8 folds. Radius is not the length of a sphere!

 

[RajeshTrivedi]

On the Energy as Accounting system...I am afraid it's getting pseudo.

1. Particle antiparticle annihilation produced energy.
2. Quarks are made up of 99% energy.

So it cannot be said that it's just an accounting system.

 

[rpenner]

On the Energy as Accounting system...I am afraid it's getting pseudo.

1. Particle antiparticle annihilation produced energy.
2. Quarks are made up of 99% energy.

So it cannot be said that it's just an accounting system.

Your ignorance of physics doesn't give you license to make such claims. Energy is a man-made concept used to describe the universe about us. Nothing in nature comes with an energy meter, but when doing physics we see that the behavior of nature is that energy is conserved. Thus analogies to accounting are natural and appropriate.

Not only does nature not come with energy meters, but the very concept appears to be useless as what energy a particle is assigned is a function not only of the particle, but of the model we choose to describe it in.

Example: I have two particles collide and calculate the result. To do this I use conservation of energy. You, moving relative to me, calculate the result from the same two particles based on a different standard of rest. To do this you use conservation of energy. But my total energy does not match yours, even though our results match when the different standard of rest is taken into account. Thus even though there is energy conservation, there is no such thing as absolute energy, it is a convention based on one's assumptions while modeling physical phenomena.

Saying "Particle antiparticle annihilation produced energy." is meaningless. Particle-antiparticle collisions produce particles. Example: electron-positron collision produce gamma rays, but high-energy electron-positron collisions can produce quarks. No energy is produced because the total energy is exactly the same before and after.

Saying "Quarks are made up of 99% energy." is meaningless until you explain what the other 1% is, why quarks come in fixed varieties and why separates a quark from an electron from a muon from a photon.

 

[RajeshTrivedi]

Your ignorance of physics doesn't give you license to make such claims. Energy is a man-made concept used to describe the universe about us. Nothing in nature comes with an energy meter, but when doing physics we see that the behavior of nature is that energy is conserved. Thus analogies to accounting are natural and appropriate.

Not only does nature not come with energy meters, but the very concept appears to be useless as what energy a particle is assigned is a function not only of the particle, but of the model we choose to describe it in.

Example: I have two particles collide and calculate the result. To do this I use conservation of energy. You, moving relative to me, calculate the result from the same two particles based on a different standard of rest. To do this you use conservation of energy. But my total energy does not match yours, even though our results match when the different standard of rest is taken into account. Thus even though there is energy conservation, there is no such thing as absolute energy, it is a convention based on one's assumptions while modeling physical phenomena.

Saying "Particle antiparticle annihilation produced energy." is meaningless. Particle-antiparticle collisions produce particles. Example: electron-positron collision produce gamma rays, but high-energy electron-positron collisions can produce quarks. No energy is produced because the total energy is exactly the same before and after.

Saying "Quarks are made up of 99% energy." is meaningless until you explain what the other 1% is, why quarks come in fixed varieties and why separates a quark from an electron from a muon from a photon.

You could have put forward your argument, without any personal reference to me. I see you are a staff member, you must avoid such attacks.

Maths is also man made. Sure nothing comes with energy meter, but then Nothing comes with charge meter, momentum meter, angular momentum meter, Mass meter....that way everything mathematically expressible becomes accounting system.

Please counter my statement that 99% of quarks is energy, and if you know what 1% is?

roduced was typo, it's produces.

 

[paddoboy]

For all,

No 'certain density' is required for black hole formation. For a BH defining density is meaningful only when object is just at EH and about to collapse to form BH. At this point an object can have any density, from as high as nuclear to as low as near vacuum. The condition is that it's mass should fall within its schwarzschild radius, at this point density of the object is inversely proportional to mass squared. Higher the mass, lesser density and vice versa.

Wrong again...Density is without a shadow of a doubt, the prime requisite for BH formation. Once that BH is formed, then density actually becomes a meaningless concept, as a BH is mainly critically curved spacetime, with the mass confined at what we call the Singularity at its core.
Basically, the mass at the core/singularity, [not the BH itself per se] is so dense, that there is no known mechanism for providing sufficient outward force to counterbalance the inward pull of gravity, so collapse as dictated by GR, will collapse towards an infinitesimally small size with infinite spacetime curvature and density. In saying that most cosmologists accept the fact that such absurd infinite quantities will not be reached, and that it seems likely there is something that will keep the volume from being 0.

Of course you have been told all this before, and I don't expect me telling you again will make any difference, other than to show that you are still wrong.
Again, PhysBang is entirely correct.

 

[paddoboy]

Please counter my statement that 99% of quarks is energy, and if you know what 1% is?

Quarks are particles consisting of energy, angular momentum, spin, charge, and color.
Quarks could be made of smaller particles, but so far there is no evidence to support or even hint at this. If this were true, then those smaller particles likewise will not be "made of energy" either....they will only have energy.
Energy is not a substance; it is though an attribute of other things such as adding to mass and spacetime curvature and a measure of mass.
To educate you further, WIKI gives a great simplistic explanation as to what quarks are.......
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark
A quark is an elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei.
Due to a phenomenon known as color confinement, quarks are never directly observed or found in isolation; they can be found only within hadrons, such as baryons (of which protons and neutrons are examples) and mesons.[2][3] For this reason, much of what is known about quarks has been drawn from observations of the hadrons themselves.

 

[Write4U]

Question in context of the following definition;

physics : Energy
the property of matter and radiation that is manifest as a capacity to perform work (such as causing motion or the interaction of molecules): "a collision in which no energy is transferred"
ORIGIN
mid 16th cent. (denoting force or vigor of expression): from French énergie, or via late Latin from Greek energeia, from en- ‘in, within’ + ergon ‘work.
Powered by Oxford Dictionaries · © Oxford University Press

The bolded stateent sounds misleading. Can anyone explain how it is possible that no energy is exchanged during an energetic event, such as a collision and destruction of two particles smashing into each other at near SOL in a *collider* (Cern). Where do all those little sub-particles derive their energy from?

Is there an example of a "collision in which no energy is transferred"?

 

[RajeshTrivedi]

Wrong again...Density is without a shadow of a doubt, the prime requisite for BH formation. Once that BH is formed, then density actually becomes a meaningless concept, as a BH is mainly critically curved spacetime, with the mass confined at what we call the Singularity at its core.
Basically, the mass at the core/singularity, [not the BH itself per se] is so dense, that there is no known mechanism for providing sufficient outward force to counterbalance the inward pull of gravity, so collapse as dictated by GR, will collapse towards an infinitesimally small size with infinite spacetime curvature and density. In saying that most cosmologists accept the fact that such absurd infinite quantities will not be reached, and that it seems likely there is something that will keep the volume from being 0.

Of course you have been told all this before, and I don't expect me telling you again will make any difference, other than to show that you are still wrong.
Again, PhysBang is entirely correct.

a Black Hole, when the object is just at its EH, can have any density value. At this point M/R is constant and has certain value independent of mass of the object , not the density (M/V).

 

[RajeshTrivedi]

Quarks are particles consisting of energy, angular momentum, spin, charge, and color.
Quarks could be made of smaller particles, but so far there is no evidence to support or even hint at this. If this were true, then those smaller particles likewise will not be "made of energy" either....they will only have energy.
Energy is not a substance; it is though an attribute of other things such as adding to mass and spacetime curvature and a measure of mass.
To educate you further, WIKI gives a great simplistic explanation as to what quarks are.......
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark
A quark is an elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei.
Due to a phenomenon known as color confinement, quarks are never directly observed or found in isolation; they can be found only within hadrons, such as baryons (of which protons and neutrons are examples) and mesons.[2][3] For this reason, much of what is known about quarks has been drawn from observations of the hadrons themselves.

This post is quite superficial. Does not answer the content you have taken in quote.

 

[James R]

James R : The lecture you're referring to is Feynman lecture 4 : conservation of energy :

Yes, it looks like it.

And I'm sorry, but Feynman is wrong. His blocks constitute a straw-man argument. Energy is not some abstract thing, Feynman is contradicting Einstein by claiming it is. And himself too, because later on in that lecture he says this...[snip]

Your second quote is not a contradiction of what Feynman said earlier.

So, let's see. On one side of this argument, we have yourself and RajeshTrivedi. On the other side, there's me and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Feynman. I think I'm comfortable siding with Feynman on this one.

 

[James R]

On the Energy as Accounting system...I am afraid it's getting pseudo.

1. Particle antiparticle annihilation produced energy.
2. Quarks are made up of 99% energy.

So it cannot be said that it's just an accounting system.

But it can be said, and I said it several times above. I notice that you have come up with no substantive response to anything I wrote above.

 

[Q-reeus]

Is there an example of a "collision in which no energy is transferred"?

Virtually all collisions between monatomic atoms in a typical room temperature gas of say Helium are afaik perfectly elastic. Total KE before and after unchanged. Only at the very high energy MB tail would collisions result in electronic excitations thus 'internal damping'. On the other hand, KE energy transfer per se is always frame dependent - like in a game of billiards.

 

[RajeshTrivedi]

Correction: 99% if Neutron / Proton Mass is energy. It is incorrectly written as 99% of quarks is energy.

 

[James R]

Maths is also man made. Sure nothing comes with energy meter, but then Nothing comes with charge meter, momentum meter, angular momentum meter, Mass meter....that way everything mathematically expressible becomes accounting system.

It seems very reasonable to consider things like momentum and angular momentum to be accounting systems.

I mean, let's look at momentum: p = mv. It's some kind of weird combination of two completely different things: mass and velocity.

So, if an electron has momentum, would you say that the electron is made of mass and velocity? Because that's the exactly the kind of argument you and Farsight are attempting to make in the case of energy. $$E=mc^2$$. Therefore, mass is made of energy ... and also it's made of the speed of light. Is it?

Consider also, for example, charge - another thing you mention. Does the electron have a label on it saying what its charge is? No, you admit that it does not. Then what use is it to say that an electron has a certain charge? Answer: it helps us to calculate things such as the force an electron will experience in an electric field. It also helps because in many reactions the electron might undergo, the particular quantity we call "charge" is conserved. In that second sense, charge is a useful accounting system, just like energy.

Is an electron "made of charge"? Obviously not. Charge is an abstract property that we assign to the electron. You realise, of course, that the magnitude of the electron charge depends on the particular system of units we choose to use, and that its sign is ultimately completely arbitrary? These facts ought to suggest to you that "charge" is a human construct.

 

[RajeshTrivedi]

But it can be said, and I said it several times above. I notice that you have come up with no substantive response to anything I wrote above.

You are emphasizing +/- or debit credit required to assess the energy form change after certain event (on accont of energy conservation).

You are using words like substance, stuff, Mass etc, without offering what actually they are? My contention is simple, under accepted mainstream, 99% Mass of an atom is nucleus, and 99% Mass of nucleons is energy. Now pl tell me how does an accounting system impart 99% Mass to your 'substance' or 'stuff'.

 

[James R]

You are using words like substance, stuff, Mass etc, without offering what actually they are?

And you are using words like "energy" without offering what it actually is.

Do you believe energy is a substance? Can I put some "pure" energy in a container? Can I carry some "pure" energy around with me? You claim that things are "made of energy". Then where can I find the "pure" energy that exists before something is made from it?

My contention is simple, under accepted mainstream, 99% Mass of an atom is nucleus, and 99% Mass of nucleons is energy.

You are simply repeating your claim that nucleons are "made of energy". It remains for you to show that. It's not enough, by the way, to push the problem back one step by saying that nucleons are made of quarks and quarks are made of energy, or something like that.

I repeat: you are making a basic category mistake.

 

[paddoboy]

This post is quite superficial. Does not answer the content you have taken in quote.

No, it actually refutes your unsupported claim.....simple as that.
Quarks are particles consisting of energy, angular momentum, spin, charge, and color.
Quarks could be made of smaller particles, but so far there is no evidence to support or even hint at this. If this were true, then those smaller particles likewise will not be "made of energy" either....they will only have energy.
Energy is not a substance; it is though an attribute of other things such as adding to mass and spacetime curvature and a measure of mass.
To educate you further, WIKI gives a great simplistic explanation as to what quarks are.......
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark

 

[paddoboy]

a Black Hole, when the object is just at its EH, can have any density value. At this point M/R is constant and has certain value independent of mass of the object , not the density (M/V).

No, any mass must have a density that sees the surface escape velocity equal "c" if it becomes a BH: You can twist as much as you like but nothing changes that fact.
Of course once that stage is reached, further collapse is compulsory, which certainly invalidates any Mitchel like "Dark Star" or BNS.