/sci/ - Science & Math

>we receive more than we put in?
Nope.

>>3707425
How do cars run on gasoline then? All it takes is a spark, and we get this huge explosion of energy

>>3707415
>If we get wood hot enough, it burns and releases its energy


How do you get it hot in the first place?
You vibrate the molecules...
Apply this to your chain of questioning OP and see where it leads you.

>>3707447
Why do you think they call it 'fossil fuels'?

>>3707447
The gasoline already contained the energy. The total energy of the system does not go up.

>>3707459
>>3707455
>>3707425
You are misunderstanding my post. I'm not talking about thermodynamics here

OP seems to be hinting at a false vacuum, and deriving energy from dropping the universe to a lower "vacuum" energy.

Nothing we see suggests that vacuum is not already the ground floor for energy.

>Why is energy able to be locked up in stable states like this

WHAT EXACTLY DO YOU THINK MATTER IS?

>>3707463
> I'm not talking about thermodynamics here
Until you clarify how it's not, then yes, you are talking about thermodynamics, whether you know it or not.

>>3707474
So when we burn wood, part of the wood matter is transformed into energy?

>>3707476
I'm asking why its so common for energy to be in stable forms that we can easily access by only reaching a portion of the amount of energy contained in. Go back and read the original post.

>>3707497
>part of the wood matter is transformed into energy?
exactly

>>3707497
>So when we burn wood, part of the wood matter is transformed into energy?
Gravitational mass in the form of chemical bonds is converted into heat energy.

OP, the gasoline contains the energy from the sun captured by plants via photosynthesis that died and were burried in swamps and marshes millions of years ago.

>>3707497
>part of the wood matter is transformed into energy?
Sort-of. The chemicals of the wood are broken down, and those broken bonds release energy (the final compounds have lower energy than the initial ones). Chemical energy release isn't usually described in terms of mass defect though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combustion

>>3707497
>I'm asking why its so common for energy to be in stable forms that we can easily access by only reaching a portion of the amount of energy contained in.
It's actually not that common outside of biological processes. You can't burn rocks. But wood, fossil fuels, etc.

The only real sources of energy we have are nuclear (fusion from the sun, etc). That's where the wood and fossil fuel energy comes from too.

But nuclear fusion is just "burning" hydrogen into helium (in a sense - it's a nuclear reaction, not a chemical one), and that'll all just energy lying around after the Big Bang.

once we get wood hot enough carbon and oxygen get together to form CO_2. That reaction causes the release of energy in the form of heat.

There is no next step. I don't see how you jump from heat to "bending" space. All the things you posted starts with heat. Even when you don't hold a match up to something, heat is still involved. Hydrogen clouds becoming so dense that they become stars. All that matter pushing on itself causes heat.

You can't burn or bend empty space. Space is a mathematical concept of "that thing that isn't really a thing but the place between things"

>>3707497
>I'm asking why its so common for energy to be in stable forms that we can easily access by only reaching a portion of the amount of energy contained in

I'll draw a graph.

>>3707543
Thanks, specifically my question is why there is a hump. Just a fluke of configuration? Island of stability and all that?

>>3707536
When I mention space, I was thinking of hawking radiation. If we bend space enough, or use a strong enough magnetic field, we can separate out the antimatter particle from pair production, right?

>>3707551
If there weren't a hump, it would burn immediately. All such reactions have already happened. The ones remaining don't happen until you supply enough energy (usually heat) to get over the hump.

And plants and such are fighting the battle the other way, turning simple chemicals into higher-energy ones, and they get the energy to do so from sunlight.

>>3707562
You have to input at least as much energy as is contained in the particle pair you create. It's not a source of energy, unless you already have antimatter lying around and "burn" (annihilate) it with matter.

>>3707551
Pretty much. There are some configurations that are more stable than others, studying this is a bedrock of thermodynamics and especially Ginzburg Landau theory.

>>3707571
Do you? I was under the impression particles were popping in and out of existance all the time

Energy wells, etc.

Essentially in nature you have different forces between different particles. When you have a system of different particles and different forces, everything can sort of get tangled up.

The same logic can be applied to that episode of the simpsons where homer is trying to decide whether he wants to buy a winning lottery ticket or some candy bar. Obviously the ability to obtain the money from the lotto ticket would result in a tremendous amount of candy bars, but in order to release these candy bars homer has to first cross a "mental well", so to speak.

Study quantum physics OP :3

tl;dr nature is uneven sometimes

>>3707578
the "out" is important
it occurs fast enough to be masked by the uncertainty principle

>>3707578
They don't stick around as real (not virtual) particles until you dump in enough energy to be at least that much.

With vacuum fluctuations, there is an uncertainty relation between the energy of the particle pair and how long they stick around before vanishing again. The more energy, the shorter they exist, and the timescales for even the lightest particle pairs is very, very short.

However, this gets to why vacuum is the lowest energy state, from which no further energy can be extracted (there is no lower state to go to), and yet vacuum still has nonzero energy on average over time.

>>3707578

people working in particle accelerators smash two particles together after having dramatically increased the momentum of the collision system (accelerating them to near the speed of light).

When these particles collide, new particles are formed; much like how debris would spread out if you collided two moons with each other or something.

The central concept is that a threshold of energy must be applied to the particles in order to make them interact to break into new ones / release energy.

>>3707609
Not that guy, but I would add that any genuinely new particles are brought into existence from that collision come from some of the massive amount of energy you've dumped into accelerating the particles.