Conservation of energy

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This article is about the law of conservation of energy in physics. For sustainable energy resources,
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In physics, the law of conservation of energy states that the total energy of an isolated
system remains constantit is said to be conserved over time. Energy can be neither created nor be
destroyed, but it transforms from one form to another, for instance chemical energy can
be converted to kinetic energy in the explosion of a stick of dynamite.
A consequence of the law of conservation of energy is that a perpetual motion machine of the first
kind cannot exist. That is to say, no system without an external energy supply can deliver an
unlimited amount of energy to its surroundings.[1]
Contents
[hide]

1 History
o

1.1 Mechanical equivalent of heat

1.2 Massenergy equivalence

1.3 Conservation of energy in beta decay

2 First law of thermodynamics

3 Noether's theorem

4 Relativity

5 Quantum theory

6 See also

7 Footnotes

8 References

8.1 Modern accounts

8.2 History of ideas

9 External links

History[edit]

Gottfried Leibniz

Ancient philosophers as far back as Thales of Miletus c. 550 BCE had inklings of the conservation of
some underlying substance of which everything is made. However, there is no particular reason to
identify this with what we know today as "mass-energy" (for example, Thales thought it was
water).Empedocles (490430 BCE) wrote that in his universal system, composed of four
roots (earth, air, water, fire), "nothing comes to be or perishes"; [2]instead, these elements suffer
continual rearrangement.
In 1638, Galileo published his analysis of several situationsincluding the celebrated "interrupted
pendulum"which can be described (in modern language) as conservatively converting potential
energy to kinetic energy and back again.
It was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz during 16761689 who first attempted a mathematical formulation of
the kind of energy which is connected withmotion (kinetic energy). Leibniz noticed that in many
mechanical systems (of several masses, mi each with velocity vi ),

was conserved so long as the masses did not interact. He called

this quantity the vis viva or living force of the system. The principle
represents an accurate statement of the approximate conservation
of kinetic energy in situations where there is no friction.
Many physicists at that time held that the conservation of
momentum, which holds even in systems with friction, as defined by
the momentum:

was the conserved vis viva. It was later shown that both
quantities are conserved simultaneously, given the proper
conditions such as an elastic collision.
It was largely engineers such as John Smeaton, Peter
Ewart, Carl Holtzmann, Gustave-Adolphe Hirn and Marc
Seguin who objected that conservation of momentum alone
was not adequate for practical calculation and made use of
Leibniz's principle. The principle was also championed by
some chemists such as William Hyde Wollaston. Academics
such as John Playfair were quick to point out that kinetic energy
is clearly not conserved. This is obvious to a modern analysis

based on the second law of thermodynamics, but in the 18th

and 19th centuries the fate of the lost energy was still unknown.
Gradually it came to be suspected that the heat inevitably
generated by motion under friction was another form of vis viva.
In 1783, Antoine Lavoisier and Pierre-Simon Laplace reviewed
the two competing theories of vis viva and caloric theory.
[3]
Count Rumford's 1798 observations of heat generation during
the boring of cannons added more weight to the view that
mechanical motion could be converted into heat, and (as
importantly) that the conversion was quantitative and could be
predicted (allowing for a universal conversion constant between
kinetic energy and heat). Vis viva then started to be known
as energy, after the term was first used in that sense
by Thomas Young in 1807.

Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis

The recalibration of vis viva to

which can be understood as converting kinetic energy

to work, was largely the result of Gaspard-Gustave
Coriolis and Jean-Victor Poncelet over the period 1819
1839. The former called the quantity quantit de
travail (quantity of work) and the latter, travail
mcanique (mechanical work), and both championed its
use in engineering calculation.
In a paper ber die Natur der Wrme, published in
the Zeitschrift fr Physik in 1837, Karl Friedrich Mohr gave
one of the earliest general statements of the doctrine of the
conservation of energy in the words: "besides the 54 known
chemical elements there is in the physical world one agent
only, and this is called Kraft [energy or work]. It may appear,
according to circumstances, as motion, chemical affinity,
cohesion, electricity, light and magnetism; and from any one
of these forms it can be transformed into any of the others."

Mechanical equivalent of heat[edit]

A key stage in the development of the modern conservation
principle was the demonstration of the mechanical

equivalent of heat. The caloric theory maintained that heat

could neither be created nor destroyed, whereas
conservation of energy entails the contrary principle that
heat and mechanical work are interchangeable.
In the middle of the eighteenth century Mikhail Lomonosov,
a Russian scientist, postulated his corpusculo-kinetic theory
of heat, which rejected the idea of a caloric. Through the
results of empirical studies, Lomonosov came to the
conclusion that heat was not transferred through the
particles of the caloric fluid.
In 1798 Count Rumford (Benjamin Thompson) performed
measurements of the frictional heat generated in boring
cannons, and developed the idea that heat is a form of
kinetic energy; his measurements refuted caloric theory, but
were imprecise enough to leave room for doubt.

James Prescott Joule

The mechanical equivalence principle was first stated in its

modern form by the German surgeon Julius Robert von
Mayer in 1842.[4] Mayer reached his conclusion on a voyage
to the Dutch East Indies, where he found that his patients'
blood was a deeper red because they were consuming
less oxygen, and therefore less energy, to maintain their
body temperature in the hotter climate. He discovered
that heat and mechanical work were both forms of energy
and in 1845, after improving his knowledge of physics, he
published a monograph that stated a quantitative
relationship between them.[5]

Joule's apparatus for measuring the mechanical equivalent of

heat. A descending weight attached to a string causes a
paddle immersed in water to rotate.

Meanwhile, in 1843 James Prescott Joule independently

discovered the mechanical equivalent in a series of
experiments. In the most famous, now called the "Joule
apparatus", a descending weight attached to a string
caused a paddle immersed in water to rotate. He showed
that the gravitational potential energy lost by the weight in
descending was equal to the internal energy gained by the
water through friction with the paddle.
Over the period 18401843, similar work was carried out by
engineer Ludwig A. Colding though it was little known
outside his native Denmark.
Both Joule's and Mayer's work suffered from resistance and
neglect but it was Joule's that eventually drew the wider
recognition.
For the dispute between Joule and Mayer over priority,
see Mechanical equivalent of heat: Priority.
In 1844, William Robert Grove postulated a relationship
between mechanics,
heat, light, electricity and magnetism by treating them all as
manifestations of a single "force" (energy in modern terms).
In 1874 Grove published his theories in his book The
Correlation of Physical Forces.[6] In 1847, drawing on the
earlier work of Joule, Sadi Carnot and mile
Clapeyron, Hermann von Helmholtz arrived at conclusions
similar to Grove's and published his theories in his
book ber die Erhaltung der Kraft (On the Conservation of
Force, 1847).[7] The general modern acceptance of the
principle stems from this publication.
In 1850, William Rankine first used the phrase the law of
the conservation of energy for the principle.[8]
In 1877, Peter Guthrie Tait claimed that the principle
originated with Sir Isaac Newton, based on a creative
reading of propositions 40 and 41 of the Philosophiae
Naturalis Principia Mathematica. This is now regarded as
an example of Whig history.[9]

Massenergy equivalence[edit]
Main article: Massenergy equivalence
Matter is composed of such things as atoms, electrons,
neutrons, and protons. It has intrinsic or rest mass. In the
limited range of recognized experience of the nineteenth
century it was found that such rest mass is conserved.
Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity showed that it
corresponds to an equivalent amount of rest energy. This
means that it can be converted to or from equivalent

amounts of other (non-material) forms of energy, for

example kinetic energy, potential energy, and
electromagnetic radiant energy. When this happens, as
recognized in twentieth century experience, rest mass is
not conserved, unlike the total mass or total energy. All
forms of energy contribute to the total mass and total
energy.
For example, an electron and a positron each have rest
mass. They can perish together, converting their combined
rest energy into photons having electromagnetic radiant
energy, but no rest mass. If this occurs within an isolated
system that does not release the photons or their energy
into the external surroundings, then neither the
total mass nor the total energy of the system will change.
The produced electromagnetic radiant energy contributes
just as much to the inertia (and to any weight) of the system
as did the rest mass of the electron and positron before
their demise. Likewise, non-material forms of energy can
perish into matter, which has rest mass.
Thus, conservation of energy (total, including material
or rest energy), and conservation of mass (total, not
just rest), each still holds as an (equivalent) law. In the
nineteenth century these had appeared as two seeminglydistinct laws.

Conservation of energy in beta decay[edit]

Main article: Beta decay Neutrinos in beta decay
The discovery in 1911 that electrons emitted in beta
decay have a continuous rather than a discrete spectrum
appeared to contradict conservation of energy, under the
then-current assumption that beta decay is the simple
emission of an electron from a nucleus. This problem was
eventually resolved in 1933 by Enrico Fermi who proposed
the correctdescription of beta-decay as the emission of both
an electron and an antineutrino, which carries away the
apparently missing energy.

First law of thermodynamics[edit]

Main article: First law of thermodynamics
For a closed thermodynamic system, the first law of
thermodynamics may be stated as:
, or equivalently,
where
is the amount of energy added to the
system by a heating process,
is the amount of
energy lost by the system due to work done by the
system on its surroundings and
is the change in
the internal energy of the system.

The 's before the heat and work terms are used to
indicate that they describe an increment of energy
which is to be interpreted somewhat differently than
the
increment of internal energy (see Inexact
differential). Work and heat refer to kinds of process
which add or subtract energy to or from a system, while
the internal energy
is a property of a particular state
of the system when it is in unchanging thermodynamic
equilibrium. Thus the term "heat energy" for
means
"that amount of energy added as the result of heating"
rather than referring to a particular form of energy.
Likewise, the term "work energy" for
means "that
amount of energy lost as the result of work". Thus one
can state the amount of internal energy possessed by a
thermodynamic system that one knows is presently in a
given state, but one cannot tell, just from knowledge of
the given present state, how much energy has in the
past flowed into or out of the system as a result of its
being heated or cooled, nor as the result of work being
performed on or by the system.
Entropy is a function of the state of a system which tells
of the possibility of conversion of heat into work.
For a simple compressible system, the work performed
by the system may be written:

where
is the pressure and
is a small
change in the volume of the system, each of which
are system variables. The heat energy may be
written

where
is the temperature and
is a small
change in the entropy of the system.
Temperature and entropy are variables of state
of a system.
For a simple open system (in which mass may
be exchanged with the environment),
containing a single type of particle, the first law
is written:[10]

where
is the added mass and
is
the internal energy per unit mass of the
added mass. The addition of mass may be
accompanied by a volume change which is
not associated with work (e.g. for a liquidvapor system, the volume of the vapor
system may increase due to volume lost by
the evaporating liquid). In the reversible

case, the work will be given

by
where v
is the specific volume of the added mass.

Noether's theorem[edit]
Main article: Noether's theorem
The conservation of energy is a common
feature in many physical theories. From a
mathematical point of view it is understood
as a consequence of Noether's theorem,
developed by Emmy Noether in 1915 and
first published in 1918. The theorem states
every continuous symmetry of a physical
theory has an associated conserved
quantity; if the theory's symmetry is time
invariance then the conserved quantity is
called "energy". The energy conservation
law is a consequence of the
shift symmetry of time; energy
conservation is implied by the empirical
fact that the laws of physics do not change
with time itself. Philosophically this can be
stated as "nothing depends on time per
se". In other words, if the physical system
is invariant under the continuous
symmetry of time translation then its
energy (which is canonical
conjugate quantity to time) is conserved.
Conversely, systems which are not
invariant under shifts in time (an example,
systems with time dependent potential
energy) do not exhibit conservation of
energy unless we consider them to
exchange energy with another, external
system so that the theory of the enlarged
system becomes time invariant again.
Since any time-varying system can be
embedded within a larger time-invariant
system (with the exception of the
universe), conservation can always be
recovered by a suitable re-definition of
what energy is and extending the scope of
your system. Conservation of energy for
finite systems is valid in such physical
theories as special relativity and quantum
theory (including QED) in the flatspacetime.

Relativity[edit]

With the discovery of special

relativity by Albert Einstein, energy was
proposed to be one component of
an energy-momentum 4-vector. Each of
the four components (one of energy and
three of momentum) of this vector is
separately conserved across time, in any
closed system, as seen from any
given inertial reference frame. Also
conserved is the vector length (Minkowski
norm), which is the rest mass for single
particles, and the invariant mass for
systems of particles (where momenta and
energy are separately summed before the
length is calculatedsee the article
on invariant mass).
The relativistic energy of a
single massive particle contains a term
related to its rest mass in addition to its
kinetic energy of motion. In the limit of zero
kinetic energy (or equivalently in the rest
frame) of a massive particle; or else in
the center of momentum frame for objects
or systems which retain kinetic energy,
the total energy of particle or object
(including internal kinetic energy in
systems) is related to its rest mass or
its invariant mass via the famous
equation
.
Thus, the rule of conservation of
energy over time in special
relativity continues to hold, so long as
the reference frame of the observer is
unchanged. This applies to the total energy
of systems, although different observers
disagree as to the energy value. Also
conserved, and invariant to all observers,
is the invariant mass, which is the minimal
system mass and energy that can be seen
by any observer, and which is defined by
the energymomentum relation.
In general relativity conservation of energymomentum is expressed with the aid of
a stress-energy-momentum pseudotensor.
The theory of general relativity leaves open
the question of whether there is a
conservation of energy for the entire
universe.

Quantum theory[edit]

In quantum mechanics, energy of a

quantum system is described by a selfadjoint (or Hermitian) operator called
the Hamiltonian, which acts on the Hilbert
space (or a space ofwave functions ) of the
system. If the Hamiltonian is a time
independent operator, emergence
probability of the measurement result does
not change in time over the evolution of the
system. Thus the expectation value of
energy is also time independent. The local
energy conservation in quantum field
theory is ensured by the
quantum Noether's theoremfor energymomentum tensor operator. Note that due
to the lack of the (universal) time operator
in quantum theory, the uncertainty relations
for time and energy are not fundamental in
contrast to the position-momentum
uncertainty principle, and merely holds in
specific cases (see Uncertainty principle).
Energy at each fixed time can in principle
be exactly measured without any trade-off
in precision forced by the time-energy
uncertainty relations. Thus the
conservation of energy in time is a well
defined concept even in quantum
mechanics.

See also[edit]

Energy quality

Energy transformation

Eternity of the world

Laws of thermodynamics

Lagrangian

Principles of energetics

Footnotes[edit]
1.

Jump up^ Planck, M.

(1923/1927). Treatise on
Thermodynamics, third English edition
translated by A. Ogg from the seventh
German edition, Longmans, Green &
Co., London, page 40.

2.

Jump up^ Janko, Richard

(2004). "Empedocles, "On
Nature"" (PDF). Zeitschrift fr
Papyrologie und Epigraphik 150: 1
26.

3.

Jump up^ Lavoisier, A.L. & Laplace,

P.S. (1780) "Memoir on
Heat", Acadmie Royale des
Sciencespp. 4355

4.

Jump up^ von Mayer, J.R. (1842)

"Remarks on the forces of inorganic
nature" in Annalen der Chemie und
Pharmacie, 43, 233

5.

Jump up^ Mayer, J.R. (1845). Die

organische Bewegung in ihrem
Zusammenhange mit dem
Stoffwechsel. Ein Beitrag zur
Naturkunde, Dechsler, Heilbronn.

6.

Jump up^ Grove, W. R. (1874). The

Correlation of Physical Forces (6th
ed.). London: Longmans, Green.

7.

Jump up^ "On the Conservation of

Force". Bartleby. Retrieved April
6, 2014.

8.

Jump up^ William John Macquorn

Rankine (1853) "On the General Law
of the Transformation of
Energy," Proceedings of the
Philosophical Society of Glasgow, vol.
3, no. 5, pages 276-280; reprinted in:
(1) Philosophical Magazine, series 4,
vol. 5, no. 30, pages 106117(February 1853); and (2) W. J.
Millar, ed., Miscellaneous Scientific
Papers: by W. J. Macquorn
Rankine, ... (London, England:
Charles Griffin and Co., 1881), part
II, pages 203-208: "The law of
the Conservation of Energy is already
knownviz. that the sum of all the
energies of the universe, actual and
potential, is unchangeable."

9.

Jump up^ Hadden, Richard W.

(1994). On the shoulders of
merchants: exchange and the
mathematical conception of nature in
early modern Europe. SUNY Press.
p. 13. ISBN 0-7914-2011-6., Chapter 1
, p. 13

10. Jump up^ Smith, D. A.

(1980). "Definition of Heat in Open
SYstems". Aust. J. Phys 33: 95105.
Retrieved 8 March 2013.

References[edit]
Modern accounts[edit]

Goldstein, Martin, and Inge F.,

(1993). The Refrigerator and the
Universe. Harvard Univ. Press. A
gentle introduction.

Kroemer, Herbert; Kittel, Charles

(1980). Thermal Physics (2nd ed.). W.
H. Freeman Company. ISBN 0-71671088-9.

Nolan, Peter J. (1996). Fundamentals

of College Physics, 2nd ed. William C.
Brown Publishers.

Oxtoby & Nachtrieb (1996). Principles

of Modern Chemistry, 3rd ed.
Saunders College Publishing.

Papineau, D. (2002). Thinking about

Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Serway, Raymond A.; Jewett, John W.

(2004). Physics for Scientists and
Engineers (6th ed.).
Brooks/Cole. ISBN 0-534-40842-7.

Stenger, Victor J. (2000). Timeless

Reality. Prometheus Books. Especially
chpt. 12. Nontechnical.

Tipler, Paul (2004). Physics for

Scientists and Engineers: Mechanics,
Oscillations and Waves,
Thermodynamics (5th ed.). W. H.
Freeman. ISBN 0-7167-0809-4.

Lanczos, Cornelius (1970). The

Variational Principles of Mechanics.
Toronto: University of Toronto
Press. ISBN 0-8020-1743-6.

History of ideas[edit]

Brown, T.M. (1965). "Resource letter

EEC-1 on the evolution of energy
concepts from Galileo to
Helmholtz". American Journal of
Physics 33 (10): 759
765.Bibcode:1965AmJPh..33..759B. d
oi:10.1119/1.1970980.

Cardwell, D.S.L. (1971). From Watt to

Clausius: The Rise of
Thermodynamics in the Early
Industrial Age. London:
Heinemann. ISBN 0-435-54150-1.

Guillen, M. (1999). Five Equations

That Changed the World. New York:
Abacus. ISBN 0-349-11064-6.

Hiebert, E.N. (1981). Historical Roots

of the Principle of Conservation of
Energy. Madison, Wis.: Ayer Co
Pub. ISBN 0-405-13880-6.

Kuhn, T.S. (1957) "Energy

conservation as an example of
simultaneous discovery", in M. Clagett
(ed.) Critical Problems in the History of
Science pp.32156

Sarton, G.; Joule, J. P.; Carnot, Sadi

(1929). "The discovery of the law of
conservation of energy". Isis 13: 18
49. doi:10.1086/346430.

Smith, C. (1998). The Science of

Energy: Cultural History of Energy
Physics in Victorian Britain. London:
Heinemann. ISBN 0-485-11431-3.

Mach, E. (1872). History and Root of

the Principles of the Conservation of
Energy. Open Court Pub. Co., Illinois.

Poincar, H. (1905). Science and

Hypothesis. Walter Scott Publishing
Co. Ltd; Dover reprint, 1952. ISBN 0486-60221-4., Chapter 8, "Energy and
Thermo-dynamics"

External links[edit]

The First Law of

Thermodynamics (PDF file) by Jerzy
Borysowicz for Project PHYSNET.
MISN-0-158

GND: 4152219-9

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