View Full Version : A Flaw


Mosier
03-08-02, 12:39 AM
Alrihgt anyone good in physics might be able to help me with this that ive been pondering.

alrihgt, charges. when 2 postively or negatively charged particles are withing the limited distance of eachother they repel. what makes them repel? physics says photons. a small massless particle is emitted from the charged particle and hits the opposing one and then is reabsorbed. but these photons are even refered to as "virtual photons". the origional particles dont lose any energy when emmiting these photons so technicaly what is happening is the measurement of enery is not relative to the time, therfore the energy is "fuzzy"...... so in other words its making energy of nothing then absorbing it back and gaining no energy back..... DOESNT THIS DEFY THE F***ING LAW OF CONSERVATION OF ENERGY AND PRETTY MUCH CONTRADICT JUST ABOUT EVERYHTING WE BASE OUR KNOWLEDGE OF ENERGY ON????

im confused so someone help me

James R
03-08-02, 01:02 AM
The energy for virtual particles is "borrowed" from the quantum vacuum, as permitted by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Yes, it does violate energy conservation, but only for the short time that quantum uncertainty allows.

Mosier
03-08-02, 01:44 AM
Well where does the energy from the quantum vacuum come from??? im so confused....

ismu
03-08-02, 03:09 AM
So... there is a phenomenon violate law of energy conservation.
I'll just watch and learn here... :bugeye:

Snegithan
03-08-02, 05:36 AM
One cannot prove a LAW to be wrong with this ease...

the thing is that they haven't clearly analysed the law for the given case.

Actually U can't just like that place two similar charges within a limit. To do that U first have to do some work on the charge which will be stored as Potential Energy in the charge itself.
When the force which holding the charge in place is released then the energy is converted into Kinetic Energy.

Thus there is no energy created really. It's just the work u do against the charge to place it within limits is stored as P.E. and then converted to K.E


:)

Adam
03-08-02, 06:26 AM
Welcome Snegithan.

James R
03-08-02, 06:12 PM
The energy in the quantum vacuum is a fluctuation which must exist to satisfy the uncertainty principle. One version of the uncertainty principle is:

<font face="symbol">D</font>E.<font face="symbol">D</font>t >= h/4<font face="symbol">p</font>

Here, <font face="symbol">D</font>E is the uncertainty in the energy, <font face="symbol">D</font>t is the uncertainty in time, and h is Planck's constant.

In other words, if you measure the energy of <i>anything</i>, the uncertainty in that energy will increase as the measurement time gets shorter. That includes measurements of the energy of "empty" space. The energy in empty space is zero, plus or minus <font face="symbol">D</font>E. For very short times, the energy fluctuation <font face="symbol">D</font>E can be large enough to create a virtual particle or two out of the vacuum. Usually these particles rapidly vanish, but while they exist they can measureably affect things around them.

ismu
03-08-02, 09:48 PM
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/ast123/lectures/lec17.html

http://www.slac.stanford.edu/slac/media-info/20000605/chen.html

http://www.ldolphin.org/energetic.html

http://bio.nagaokaut.ac.jp/~matsuno/LAWS.htm

esp
03-09-02, 06:22 AM
I seem to remember this being used as an argument for the invalidity of the first law of thermodynamics.

As James R pointed out at the time, the energy does seem to come from nowhere, but is so short lived it might as well not bother.