Conservation of energy and matter

[JDot]

The conservation of energy and matter (physics)
Does this mean we will live forever?

[doolally]

Depends what you mean by "live".
Our electrons, protons etc will exist for ever. Probably
doolally

[JDot]

Depends what you mean by "live".
Our electrons, protons etc will exist for ever. Probably
doolally

Thanks I take comfort in that!

[88V8]

Our electrons, protons etc will exist for ever....

Make one wonder what they were doing before they were us.
Perhaps my little toe should be 'cancelled' because of its past deeds.
It's a minefield.

V8

[Arborbridge]

Our electrons, protons etc will exist for ever....

Make one wonder what they were doing before they were us.
Perhaps my little toe should be 'cancelled' because of its past deeds.
It's a minefield.

V8

I've often wondered that about whatever it is that causes disease. What does it do for a living before it meets a host? Just sort of hangs around, I suppose. What are smallpox and maleria without being smallpox and maleria?

[odysseus2000]

Our electrons, protons etc will exist for ever....

Make one wonder what they were doing before they were us.
Perhaps my little toe should be 'cancelled' because of its past deeds.
It's a minefield.

V8

I've often wondered that about whatever it is that causes disease. What does it do for a living before it meets a host? Just sort of hangs around, I suppose. What are smallpox and maleria without being smallpox and maleria?

As I understand it, with out an host smallpox cease to exist unless cared for in laboratory conditions which was behind all the media attention to the belief that d as msllpox had been eradicated & should the few lab specimens be destroyed.

Regards,

[ursaminortaur]

Depends what you mean by "live".
Our electrons, protons etc will exist for ever. Probably
doolally

It is reasonably likely that protons will eventually decay but our current best estimate is that they last at least 10^34 years.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/01/03/how-certain-are-we-that-protons-dont-decay/

Theoretically, there are good reasons to expect that the proton might be fundamentally unstable. The biggest one is this: the fact that the entirety our Universe appears to be made of matter and not antimatter.
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There is no arguing, however, that in all our endeavors to measure the stability of the proton, we've never observed even one event of a proton spontaneously decaying into lighter particles and violating the conservation of baryon number. If the proton is truly stable and will never decay, it means that a whole lot of proposed extensions to the Standard Model — Grand Unification Theories, supersymmetry, supergravity and string theory among them — cannot describe our Universe.

[JDot]

Depends what you mean by "live".
Our electrons, protons etc will exist for ever. Probably
doolally

It is reasonably likely that protons will eventually decay but our current best estimate is that they last at least 10^34 years.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/01/03/how-certain-are-we-that-protons-dont-decay/

Theoretically, there are good reasons to expect that the proton might be fundamentally unstable. The biggest one is this: the fact that the entirety our Universe appears to be made of matter and not antimatter.
.
.
.
There is no arguing, however, that in all our endeavors to measure the stability of the proton, we've never observed even one event of a proton spontaneously decaying into lighter particles and violating the conservation of baryon number. If the proton is truly stable and will never decay, it means that a whole lot of proposed extensions to the Standard Model — Grand Unification Theories, supersymmetry, supergravity and string theory among them — cannot describe our Universe.

I guess protons deal with the energy part, How would you describe the conservation of matter?

[odysseus2000]

Depends what you mean by "live".
Our electrons, protons etc will exist for ever. Probably
doolally

It is reasonably likely that protons will eventually decay but our current best estimate is that they last at least 10^34 years.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/01/03/how-certain-are-we-that-protons-dont-decay/

Theoretically, there are good reasons to expect that the proton might be fundamentally unstable. The biggest one is this: the fact that the entirety our Universe appears to be made of matter and not antimatter.
.
.
.
There is no arguing, however, that in all our endeavors to measure the stability of the proton, we've never observed even one event of a proton spontaneously decaying into lighter particles and violating the conservation of baryon number. If the proton is truly stable and will never decay, it means that a whole lot of proposed extensions to the Standard Model — Grand Unification Theories, supersymmetry, supergravity and string theory among them — cannot describe our Universe.

I guess protons deal with the energy part, How would you describe the conservation of matter?

In Einstein's formation Energy=mass x c**2, then mass and energy are directly related, so that if you change the mass you simultaneously change the energy and vice versa.

The matter/anti matter imbalance in the universe remains one of the big challenges to explain.

For reasons unknown (many theories) there is an asymmetry in our galaxy that favour matter over anti-matter. We do not see primary anti-protons in the cosmic rays for example. It is possible that there are other galaxies composed of anti-matter.

Experiments at Cern, several years ago, showed that protons and anti-protons both "feel" gravity in the same magnitude and direction. I.e. that the gravitational fields that fill, we believe, all space, (although some argue that fields have range limits, but no experimental data) act symmetrically on matter and anti-matter.

Regards,

[ursaminortaur]

Depends what you mean by "live".
Our electrons, protons etc will exist for ever. Probably
doolally

It is reasonably likely that protons will eventually decay but our current best estimate is that they last at least 10^34 years.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/01/03/how-certain-are-we-that-protons-dont-decay/

Theoretically, there are good reasons to expect that the proton might be fundamentally unstable. The biggest one is this: the fact that the entirety our Universe appears to be made of matter and not antimatter.
.
.
.
There is no arguing, however, that in all our endeavors to measure the stability of the proton, we've never observed even one event of a proton spontaneously decaying into lighter particles and violating the conservation of baryon number. If the proton is truly stable and will never decay, it means that a whole lot of proposed extensions to the Standard Model — Grand Unification Theories, supersymmetry, supergravity and string theory among them — cannot describe our Universe.

I guess protons deal with the energy part, How would you describe the conservation of matter?

Protons are generally considered to be matter particles - did you (or doolally) perhaps mean to refer to photons which are massless quanta of energy ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter

All everyday objects that can be touched are ultimately composed of atoms, which are made up of interacting subatomic particles, and in everyday as well as scientific usage, "matter" generally includes atoms and anything made up of them, and any particles (or combination of particles) that act as if they have both rest mass and volume. However it does not include massless particles such as photons, or other energy phenomena or waves such as light or heat

Acoording to our best theories photons being massless should not decay. The electron also shouldn't decay since there is no less massive charged particle known into which it could decay.

https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/why-do-particles-decay/most-particles-decay-yet-some-dont/

Though that hasn't stopped some scientists calculating minimum lifetimes for the photon (assuming that it isn't truly massless but has an extremely small mass) and for the electron (assuming some new physics beyond the standard model which allows the apparent breach of charge conservation).

https://physicsworld.com/a/what-is-the-lifetime-of-a-photon/

The photon – the quantum of light or other electromagnetic radiation – is normally considered to have zero mass. But some theories allow photons to have a small rest mass and one consequence of that would be that photons could then decay into lighter elementary particles. So if such a decay were possible, what are the limits on the lifetime of a photon?
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If the photon has mass and is decaying into lighter particles, then the number density of photons in the CMB should decrease as the photons travel. But this in turn would mean that the CMB spectrum would no longer fit the near-perfect thermal curve that is observed. Heeck reasons that as the CMB is an almost a perfect black body, very few photons, if any, will have decayed during the 13.8-billion-year existence of the universe and so the CMB measurements can constrain the photon’s lifetime.

Using a combination of the mass and CMB constraints, Heeck calculates the photon’s lifetime within its own rest frame to be three years. But as these photons with tiny mass travel at nearly the speed of light, time dilatation must be accounted for to obtain their lifetime in our frame of reference, for visible light – and this was calculated to be 10^18 or a billion billion years. Improving this limit might be difficult until new studies can probe the early universe further.

https://physicsworld.com/a/electron-lifetime-is-at-least-66000-yottayears/

The best measurement yet of the lifetime of the electron suggests that a particle present today will probably still be around in 66,000 yottayears (6.6 × 10^28 yr), which is about five-quintillion times the current age of the universe. That is the conclusion of physicists working on the Borexino experiment in Italy, who have been searching for evidence that the electron decays to a photon and a neutrino; a process that would violate the conservation of electrical charge and point towards undiscovered physics beyond the Standard Model.

The electron is the least-massive carrier of negative electrical charge known to physicists. If it were to decay, energy conservation means that the process would involve the production of lower-mass particles such as neutrinos. But all particles with masses lower than the electron have no electrical charge, and therefore the electron’s charge must “vanish” during any hypothetical decay process. This violates “charge conservation”, which is a principle that is part of the Standard Model of particle physics. As a result, the electron is considered a fundamental particle that will never decay. However, the Standard Model does not adequately explain all aspects of physics, and therefore the discovery of electron decay could help physicists to develop a new and improved model of nature.

[pje16]

Perhaps my little toe should be 'cancelled' because of its past deeds.
V8

hmmm........ what on earth has it done?

[servodude]

Perhaps my little toe should be 'cancelled' because of its past deeds.
V8

hmmm........ what on earth has it done?

Wee wee wee all the way home?

[9873210]

Make one wonder what they were doing before they were us.
Perhaps my little toe should be 'cancelled' because of its past deeds.
It's a minefield.

hmmm........ what on earth has it done?

It used to wait for someone to stumble into it and then blow them up.

[1nvest]

Does it matter that wind turbines currently are wasteful, don't conserve energy at times of high productivity (wind)? Of course it does. Given that some of the towers are now 500m tall, when there's spare capacity they should be lifting/hydraulic-pumping weights from the bottom toward the top, so when the wind stalls the weights might be released lowered - so as to continue to spin the turbines. Could then perhaps halve the number of required towers to yield the same broad output. Rather than lugging cement/whatever out to each tower to serve as the weight, could just use a relatively lightweight container that is filled with seawater to serve as that weight.

[Tedx]

:) Does it matter that wind turbines currently are wasteful, don't conserve energy at times of high productivity (wind)? Of course it does. Given that some of the towers are now 500m tall, when there's spare capacity they should be lifting/hydraulic-pumping weights from the bottom toward the top, so when the wind stalls the weights might be released lowered - so as to continue to spin the turbines. Could then perhaps halve the number of required towers to yield the same broad output. Rather than lugging cement/whatever out to each tower to serve as the weight, could just use a relatively lightweight container that is filled with seawater to serve as that weight.

I think half a kilometer is a bit of an exaggeration. Less than half that maybe.

I did ask the question some years agon about wind turbines lifting internal weights, but the answer at the time said is wasn't feasible. I guess lifting a huge weight high up would seriously comprimise the tower - unless it was massively engineered to cope. Still, the excess energy can be stored elsewhere (weights, water, hydrogen etc), which is what they're working on, I'm sure.

[1nvest]

I think half a kilometer is a bit of an exaggeration. Less than half that maybe.

Feet/metres etc. still get me. I do try - such as trying to stick to driving at 30 m.p.h using a speedometer that shows km/h whilst wondering how many miles per gallon I'll get after having filled up with 40 litres of petrol

[pje16]

Feet/metres etc. still get me. I do try - such as trying to stick to driving at 30 m.p.h using a speedometer that shows km/h whilst wondering how many miles per gallon I'll get after having filled up with 40 litres of petrol

add to that a 2 litre engine and 18 inch tyres
our poor little brains.

[1nvest]

Over two-thirds of people might prefer imperial over metric

A dozen eggs can be evenly split 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 ways.
Ten eggs can be evenly split 1, 2, 5 ways, of which the one and two'ers might be just as (if not more) content with imperial.

[doolally]

:) Does it matter that wind turbines currently are wasteful, don't conserve energy at times of high productivity (wind)? Of course it does. Given that some of the towers are now 500m tall, when there's spare capacity they should be lifting/hydraulic-pumping weights from the bottom toward the top, so when the wind stalls the weights might be released lowered - so as to continue to spin the turbines. Could then perhaps halve the number of required towers to yield the same broad output. Rather than lugging cement/whatever out to each tower to serve as the weight, could just use a relatively lightweight container that is filled with seawater to serve as that weight.

Have you considered how much weight would be needed and how high it would need to be lifted, and how strong the towers would need to be to support the weight, to have any noticeable effect? The principle sounds fine, the numbers just don't stack up
doolally

[1nvest]

:) Does it matter that wind turbines currently are wasteful, don't conserve energy at times of high productivity (wind)? Of course it does. Given that some of the towers are now 500m tall, when there's spare capacity they should be lifting/hydraulic-pumping weights from the bottom toward the top, so when the wind stalls the weights might be released lowered - so as to continue to spin the turbines. Could then perhaps halve the number of required towers to yield the same broad output. Rather than lugging cement/whatever out to each tower to serve as the weight, could just use a relatively lightweight container that is filled with seawater to serve as that weight.

Have you considered how much weight would be needed and how high it would need to be lifted, and how strong the towers would need to be to support the weight, to have any noticeable effect? The principle sounds fine, the numbers just don't stack up
doolally

Lots of elastic bands then, tensioned and coiled up by the wind when there's spare capacity, left to untension (continue to turn the generators) when there's no wind Not actually proposing viable options, rather just the suggestion of 'conservation of energy' potentially halving/whatever the number of required sites. My engineering is limited to the likes of decades ago rubber band powered toy aeroplanes https://youtu.be/grUR0uQsDE0