HSS_Interviews_011407.doc.docVIP

Meeting Info: Date: Time: Place: January 14, 2006 9:00-9:30 AM WMBR Radio Attendees: 1. Introduction Segment In general, the word Energy can be paraphrased as an agent that causes changes, to a system mostly causing the system to change from its current state to a new state. Working Definition of Energy: For example, let us consider a system which consists of a bowl with water in it and let us call it system one. We now take the bowl with the water and place it on the stove. At this point, system one is at rest (or in a state of equilibrium) on the stove. We now proceed to turn on the stove, thereby changing system one from bowl+water to system two: bowl+water+fire. After 15 minutes, the water begins to boil and the state of system two changes once again from: bowl+water+fire to bowl+water+fire+water vapor. Eventually after some period of time, all of the water in the bowl has been transformed into water vapor. The fire from the stove was the agent that caused the state of the original system to change. But where did the wator vapor go? And where did the fire come from? To answer the first question, we note that the wator vapor will be passed onto another system which is the surrounding environment. If the stove is inside your kitchen most likely, the water vapor will be absorbed by the kitchen walls, the furniture inside your house, etc… In effect therefore, the wator vapor did not just disappear, the energy from the fire was transfromed into water vapor and the water vapor was transformed (absorbed) by the surrounding environment. To answer the second question, we note that the fire from the stove came from either gas or electricity and therefore the energy from the gas or the electricity has been transformed into fire. We conclude from the answers to the two questions that : Energy cannot be created nor destroyed and we say that Energy is a conserved quantity, meaning that it can only be converted from one form into another. For example, the total ene