In physics, energy is a property of objects, transferable among them via fundamental interactions, which can be converted in form but not created or destroyed. The joule is the SI unit of energy, based on the amount transferred to an object by the mechanical work of moving it 1metre against a force of 1 HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(unit)" \o "Newton (unit)" newton.[1]Work and heat are two categories of processes or mechanisms that can transfer a given amount of energy. The second law of thermodynamics limits the amount of work that can be performed by energy that is obtained via a heating process—some energy is always lost as waste heat. The maximum amount that can go into work is called the available energy. Systems such as machines and living things often require available energy, not just any energy. Mechanical and other forms of energy can be transformed in the other direction into thermal energy without such limitations.
There are many forms of energy, but all these types must meet certain conditions such as being convertible to other kinds of energy, obeying conservation of energy, and causing a proportional change in mass in objects that possess it. Common energy forms include the kinetic energy of a moving object, the radiant energy carried by light and other electromagnetic radiation, the potential energy stored by virtue of the position of an object in a force field such as a gravitational, electric or magnetic field, and the thermal energy comprising the microscopic kinetic and potential energies of the disordered motions of the particles making up matter. Some specific forms of potential energy include elastic energy due to the stretching or deformation of solid objects and chemical energy such as is released when a fuel burns. Any object that has mass when stationary, such as a piece of ordinary matter, is said to have rest mass, or anequivalent amount of energy whose form is called rest energy, though this isn't immediately apparent in everyday phenomena described by classical physics.
According to mass–energy equivalence, all forms of energy (not just rest energy) exhibit mass. For example, adding 25 kilowatt-hours (90 megajoules) of energy to an object in the form of heat (or any other form) increases its mass by 1 microgram; if you had a sensitive enough mass balance or scale, this mass increase could be measured. Our Sun transforms nuclear potential energy to other forms of energy; its total mass does not decrease due to that in itself (since it still contains the same total energy even if in different forms), but its mass does decrease when the energy escapes out to its surroundings, largely as radiant energy.
Although any energy in any single form can be transformed into another form, the law of conservation of energy states that the total energy of a system can only change if energy is transferred into or out of the system. This means that it is impossible to create or destroy energy. The total energy of a system can be calculated by adding up all forms of energy in the system. Examples of energy transfer and transformation include generating or making use of electric energy, performing chemical reactions, or lifting an object. Lifting against gravity performs work on the object and stores gravitational potential energy; if it falls, gravity does work on the object which transforms the potential energy to the kinetic energy associated with its speed.
More broadly, living organisms require available energy to stay alive; humans get such energy from food along with the oxygen needed to metabolize it. Civilisation requires a supply of energy to function; energy resources such as fossil fuelsare a vital topic in economics and politics. Earth's climate and ecosystem are driven by the radiant energy Earth receives from the sun (as well as the geothermal energy contained within the earth), and are sensitive to changes in the amount received. The word "energy" is also used outside of physics in many ways, which can lead to ambiguity and inconsistency. The vernacular terminology is not consistent with technical terminology. For example, while energy is always conserved (in the sense that the total energy does not change despite energy transformations), energy can be converted into a form, e.g., thermal energy, that cannot be utilized to perform work. When one talks about "conserving energy by driving less", one talks about conserving fossil fuels and preventing useful energy from being lost as heat. This usage of "conserve" differs from that of the law of conservation of energy.[2]The total energy of a system can be subdivided and classified in various ways. For example, classical mechanics distinguishes between kinetic energy, which is determined by an object's movement through space, and potential energy, which is a function of the position of an object within a field. It may also be convenient to distinguish gravitational energy, electric energy, thermal energy, several types of nuclear energy (which utilize potentials from the nuclear force and the weak force), electric energy (from the electric field), and magnetic energy (from the magnetic field), among others. Many of these classifications overlap; for instance, thermal energy usually consists partly of kinetic and partly of potential energy. Some types of energy are a varying mix of both potential and kinetic energy. An example ismechanical energy which is the sum of (usually macroscopic) kinetic and potential energy in a system. Elastic energy in materials is also dependent upon electrical potential energy (among atoms and molecules), as is chemical energy, which is stored and released from a reservoir of electrical potential energy between electrons, and the molecules or atomic nuclei that attract them.[need quotation to verify].The list is also not necessarily complete. Whenever physical scientists discover that a certain phenomenon appears to violate the law of energy conservation, new forms are typically added that account for the discrepancy.
Heat and work are special cases in that they are not properties of systems, but are instead properties of processes that transfer energy. In general we cannot measure how much heat or work are present in an object, but rather only how much energy is transferred among objects in certain ways during the occurrence of a given process. Heat and work are measured as positive or negative depending on which side of the transfer we view them from.
Potential energies are often measured as positive or negative depending on whether they are greater or less than the energy of a specified base state or configuration such as two interacting bodies being infinitely far apart.
HISTORY
The word energy derives from the Ancient Greek: ἐνέργεια HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energeia" \o "Energeia" energeia “activity, operation”, HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy" \l "cite_note-3" [3] which possibly appears for the first time in the work of Aristotle in the 4th century BC. In contrast to the modern definition, energeia was a qualitative philosophical concept, broad enough to include ideas such as happiness and pleasure.
In the late 17th century, Gottfried Leibniz proposed the idea of the Latin: vis viva, or living force, which defined as the product of the mass of an object and its velocity squared; he believed that total vis viva was conserved. To account for slowing due to friction, Leibniz theorized that thermal energy consisted of the random motion of the constituent parts of matter, a view shared by Isaac Newton, although it would be more than a century until this was generally accepted. The modern analog of this property, kinetic energy, differs from vis via only by a factor of two.
In 1807, Thomas Young was possibly the first to use the term "energy" instead ofvis viva, in its modern sense.[4] HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave-Gaspard_Coriolis" \o "Gustave-Gaspard Coriolis" Gustave-Gaspard Coriolis described "kinetic energy" in 1829 in its modern sense, and in 1853, William Rankine coined the term "potential energy". The law of conservation of energy, was also first postulated in the early 19th century, and applies to any isolated system. It was argued for some years whether heat was a physical substance, dubbed the caloric, or merely a physical quantity, such as momentum. In 1845 James Prescott Joule discovered the link between mechanical work and the generation of heat.
These developments led to the theory of conservation of energy, formalized largely by William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) as the field of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics aided the rapid development of explanations of chemical processes byRudolf Clausius, Josiah Willard Gibbs, and Walther Nernst. It also led to a mathematical formulation of the concept ofentropy by Clausius and to the introduction of laws of radiant energy by HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C5%BEef_Stefan" \o "Jožef Stefan" Jožef Stefan. According to HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem" \o "Noether's theorem" Noether's theorem, the conservation of energy is a consequence of the fact that the laws of physics do not change over time.[5] Thus, since 1918, theorists have understood that the law of conservation of energy is the direct mathematical consequence of thetranslational symmetry of the quantity conjugate to energy, namely time
Measurements and units
Energy, like mass, is a scalar physical quantity. The joule is the International System of Units (SI) unit of measurement for energy. It is a derived unit of energy, work, or amount of heat. It is equal to the energy expended (or work done) in applying a force of one newton through a distance of one metre. However energy is also expressed in many other units such as ergs, calories, British Thermal Units,kilowatt-hours and kilocalories for instance. There is always a conversion factor for these to the SI unit; for instance; one kWh is equivalent to 3.6 million joules.[6]The SI unit of power (energy per unit time) is the watt, which is simply a joule per second. Thus, a joule is a watt-second, so 3600 joules equal a watt-hour. The CGS energy unit is the erg, and the imperial and US customary unit is the foot pound. Other energy units such as the electron volt, food calorie or thermodynamic kcal(based on the temperature change of water in a heating process), and BTU are used in specific areas of science and commerce and have unit conversion factors relating them to the joule.
Because energy is defined as the ability to do work on objects, there is no absolute measure of energy. Only the transition of a system from one state into another can be defined and thus energy is measured in relative terms. The choice of a baseline or zero point is often arbitrary and can be made in whatever way is most convenient for a problem. For example in the case of measuring the energy deposited by X-rays as shown in the accompanying diagram, conventionally the technique most often employed is HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorimetry" \o "Calorimetry" calorimetry. This is a thermodynamic technique that relies on the measurement of temperature using a thermometer or of intensity of radiation using a bolometer.
Energy density is a term used for the amount of useful energy stored in a given system or region of space per unit volume. For fuels, the energy per unit volume is sometimes a useful parameter. In a few applications, comparing, for example, the effectiveness of hydrogen fuel to gasoline it turns out that hydrogen has a higher specific energy than does gasoline, but, even in liquid form, a much lower energy density.
Chemical mechanics
In classical mechanics, energy is a conceptually and mathematically useful property, as it is a conserved quantity. Several formulations of mechanics have been developed using energy as a core concept.
Work, a form of energy, is force times distance.
This says that the work () is equal to the line integral of the force F along a path C; for details see the mechanical work article. Work and thus energy is frame dependent. For example, consider a ball being hit by a bat. In the center-of-mass reference frame, the bat does no work on the ball. But, in the reference frame of the person swinging the bat, considerable work is done on the ball.
The total energy of a system is sometimes called the Hamiltonian, after William Rowan Hamilton. The classical equations of motion can be written in terms of the Hamiltonian, even for highly complex or abstract systems. These classical equations have remarkably direct analogs in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics.[7]Another energy-related concept is called the HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian" \o "Lagrangian" Lagrangian, after Joseph-Louis Lagrange. This is even more fundamental than the Hamiltonian, and can be used to derive the equations of motion. It was invented in the context of classical mechanics, but is generally useful in modern physics. The Lagrangian is defined as the kinetic energy minus the potential energy. Usually, the Lagrange formalism is mathematically more convenient than the Hamiltonian for non-conservative systems (such as systems with friction).
Noether's theorem (1918) states that any differentiable symmetry of the action of a physical system has a corresponding conservation law. Noether's theorem has become a fundamental tool of modern theoretical physics and the calculus of variations. A generalisation of the seminal formulations on constants of motion in Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics (1788 and 1833, respectively), it does not apply to systems that cannot be modeled with a Lagrangian; for example, dissipative systems with continuous symmetries need not have a corresponding conservation law.
Chemistry
In the context of chemistry, energy is an attribute of a substance as a consequence of its atomic, molecular or aggregate structure. Since a chemical transformation is accompanied by a change in one or more of these kinds of structure, it is invariably accompanied by an increase or decrease of energy of the substances involved. Some energy is transferred between the surroundings and the reactants of the reaction in the form of heat or light; thus the products of a reaction may have more or less energy than the reactants. A reaction is said to be HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exergonic" \o "Exergonic" exergonic if the final state is lower on the energy scale than the initial state; in the case of HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endergonic" \o "Endergonic" endergonic reactions the situation is the reverse. Chemical reactions are invariably not possible unless the reactants surmount an energy barrier known as the activation energy. The speed of a chemical reaction (at given temperature T) is related to the activation energy E, by the Boltzmann's population factor e−E/kT – that is the probability of molecule to have energy greater than or equal to E at the given temperature T. This exponential dependence of a reaction rate on temperature is known as the Arrhenius equation.The activation energy necessary for a chemical reaction can be in the form of thermal energy.
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