• Welcome to the new Internet Infidels Discussion Board, formerly Talk Freethought.

A dumb question

Identify all external and internal forces and sketch a diagram to show the resultant force vector. Does it oppose rotation?

I ca;'t do it off the top of my head on the scale of the Earth a, geology, and astrophysics, but that is how I would approach it.

The vector sum of all applied forces must equal the resulant force.
 
Yes the effect may be immeasurable by our instruments, but unless you abandon LOT and conservation there is an effect.
It does say “ directly effect”. I think the imprecision is in considering the pendulum/earth a closed system, which of course it’s not. There is still an effect but no reason that it has to accrue to or against the earth’s angular momentum: it can all be expressed as heat, right?

(IANAP)
 
Looking at it from conservation.

Motion of the Earth supplies energy to the pendulum. Earth's kinetic energy is converted to the pendulum kinetic energy and some is lost in friction showing up as heat. Entropy says all of the energy transferred to the system cannot be used to do useful work in the system. Some is lost. The heat however small is transferred to the mass of the Earth, and heat is radiated into space.

In the end kinetic energy is lost from the Earth. Within a finite volume or boundary perpetual motion or a lossless system can not not exist.

It is not theoretical for me, when I was befuddled by a problem that is one way I approached it. LOT.

A continuity equation defines where all the mass and energy goes. The assumption is causality and conservation of mass and energy are true. It is a very powerful analysis tool because it applies to all systems regardless of the processes.


A continuity equation or transport equation is an equation that describes the transport of some quantity. It is particularly simple and powerful when applied to a conserved quantity, but it can be generalized to apply to any extensive quantity. Since mass, energy, momentum, electric charge and other natural quantities are conserved under their respective appropriate conditions, a variety of physical phenomena may be described using continuity equations.
 
It will very slowly lose it's spin.

1) Tides. Sure, it's tiny. It is not zero. A tiny force over a sufficient period eventually adds up.

2) Jeans escape. The atmosphere will be slowly lost to space. The molecule that escapes will carry away a disproportionate amount of the angular momentum. Note that the vapor pressure of rock is very, very low, not zero.
 
Again a question of immeasurable small changes.

What happens when the mass of a space probe leaves the Earth?
 
A lot of people don't get that the issues with motion and work on the surface of Earth have many more barriers than in space. Things work against action on the surface, wind resistance, friction, illegal immigration, transgender issues, and electrostatic force among other things. In a vacuum, these factors aren't applicable.
These guys might disagree about one of those...
16e3a8689cca0f29038596c2866d0e39
 
The thing to ask isn't whether it'll stop spinning, but rather, what force is acting on it to stop spinning?
PERPLEXITY DAY...

Conservation of Angular Momentum​

Despite the energy loss through thermal radiation, the ball's angular momentum must be conserved in the absence of external torques. ...
The thermal radiation applies an external torque. Photons leaving a point on the spinning object's surface in the direction of the spin are blue-shifted; photons leaving in the direction opposite the spin are red-shifted; the momentum of a photon is proportional to its frequency.
 
An object is radiating heat as EM energy while at the same tine is absorbing heat from the surrounding environment.

An object and its environment want to go to equilibrium.

Photons get murky. No mass but possessing momentum.

But the Earth is only absorbing heat from one direction. There may be a power equilibrium but not a directional one.

The Earth rotates so radiation from the sun equally roasts the Earth line a chicken on rotating spit.

The CMBR looks like a black body at round 2.7 kelvin radiating in all directions.

When a photon leaves a laser is there an equal and opposite reaction?


Researchers break Newton's third law -- with lasers
A team of researchers has managed to (very technically) break Newton's third law of motion -- that every action has an equal and opposite reaction -- by accelerating laser pulses around a loop, seemingly without any corresponding push-back.
 
An object is radiating heat as EM energy while at the same tine is absorbing heat from the surrounding environment.

An object and its environment want to go to equilibrium.

Photons get murky. No mass but possessing momentum.

But the Earth is only absorbing heat from one direction. There may be a power equilibrium but not a directional one.

The Earth rotates so radiation from the sun equally roasts the Earth line a chicken on rotating spit.

sure, but I didn’t say “on one side”, I said “from one direction”. And since you were talking about momentum not energy I thought that would be relevant.
 
Last edited:
Photons get murky. No mass but possessing momentum.
No rest mass. Energy is mass; Just not much of it. If:

E=mc2

then:

m=E/c2

The mass of an energetic object is the sum of its rest mass plus its energetic mass. For a photon, the first term is zero, but the second is not:

E = hf

Where h is Planck's Constant (6.62607015×10-34Js) and f is the frequency in s-1.

So the mass of a photon is:

m = hf/c2

As h is very small, and c2 is very large, m is minuscule, even for the most energetic of gamma rays. But minuscule > 0, even if it's close enough to zero for most mechanical purposes.

As photons move at c, and momentum is mass multiplied by velocity, the momentum of a photon is:

p = hf/c

(your link derives this same result via what to me seems an unnecessarily tortured method, whose only justification appears to be their dislike of considering energetic mass and rest mass as though they were both mass, but as the SI unit for both is the kg, it is hard for me to understand that reluctance).

A spherical black-body at constant temperature radiates photons at a characteristic mean frequency in all directions, but as @Bomb#20 points out, the photons from a rotating sphere are blue or red shifted by the rotation, depending on which side of the axis they are coming from. So the average momentum of the photons differs from one side to the other, causing a reduction in angular momentum.

It ain't much, but it ain't zero.
 
Last edited:
An object is radiating heat as EM energy while at the same tine is absorbing heat from the surrounding environment.

An object and its environment want to go to equilibrium.

Photons get murky. No mass but possessing momentum.

But the Earth is only absorbing heat from one direction. There may be a power equilibrium but not a directional one.
The red-shift/blue-shift effect applies to incoming photons too, not just outgoing ones -- the solar heating that hits the morning side of the daytime hemisphere is a little bit bluer than the solar heating that hits the afternoon side. Actually the same principle applies to everything that interacts with the earth from outside. Micrometeoroids hit randomly so half of them speed up our rotation and half of them slow us down, but the half that slow us down hit harder on average.
 
An object is radiating heat as EM energy while at the same tine is absorbing heat from the surrounding environment.

An object and its environment want to go to equilibrium.

Photons get murky. No mass but possessing momentum.

But the Earth is only absorbing heat from one direction. There may be a power equilibrium but not a directional one.
The red-shift/blue-shift effect applies to incoming photons too, not just outgoing ones -- the solar heating that hits the morning side of the daytime hemisphere is a little bit bluer than the solar heating that hits the afternoon side.
but both the morning and afternoon are absorbing energy from the sun (be it a little blue- or red-shifted as you say) while the night side is not. That’s the asymmetry to which I refer.

When the earth then reradiates into space it’s more equally distributed.
 
The idea of "perpetual motion" as an exceptional and unattainable condition is medieval, and relies on the notion that motion requires an energy input to be sustained.

That's a local truth. If you live at the bottom of a gravity well, with an atmosphere, and you are so completely under the influence of those things at all times that you don't even notice them, then such "laws of nature" as 'perpetual motion without an external force is impossible', or 'nature abhors a vacuum', are easy to demonstrate.

When you realise that the vast majority of everything IS vacuum, your perspective needs to change, or your ideas will become obsolete.

A spinning object in isolation will spin forever.

A planet is not entirely isolated, of course. Tidal effects from the Sun, Moon, and other planets and even distant stars and galaxies, all act to modify the rotation of the Earth. But the distances are large, gravity is weak, and the influence is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, so it will take a LONG time for any effects to become significant.

The tides slow the rotation of the Earth. Tne Moon is the largest tidal influence, because although it's small, it's very, very close by (in cosmic terms), at only half a million miles. The Sun is also a noticable influence; it's far away, but it's very large. No other object has an effect we can easily measure, or can detect without highly specialist equipment, over short timescales (and by 'short' I mean 'less than the time that human record keeping has existed').

So yes, in a sense, the spinning of an isolated neutron star is "perpetual motion", in that the motion will continue indefinitely.

But in the sense that the complete phrase "perpetual motion" implies an unknown and supernatural influence to counter the supposed natural tendency for all motion to stop, which is how the phrase is most commonly used in philosophy, it is an erroneous concept, based on the medieval mistake of ascribing local, (earthbound) conditions and observations to the universe as a whole.

Medieval observers saw the Moon and the Sun revolving around the world, and couldn't understand why they didn't slow down like everything else. Worse still, the planets occasionally did slow down, but then speeded up again! Trying to explain this led to all kinds of weird and arbitrary hypotheses (google "epicycles" if you want to know more about the knots these guys tied themselves in, trying to explain what they could see).

Three simple (but not at all obvious) ideas did away with the philosophical need for supernatural "perpetual motion"; The hypothesis that the universe is mostly vacuum; The hypothesis that the Earth is itself in motion, and not the fixed centre of the universe; And the hypothesis that an object in motion will continue in motion unless acted upon by a force.

As all moving objects near the Earth's surface are acted upon by forces applied by the air or water through which they move, and as we cannot feel the motion of the Earth, these three ideas were very hard to accept, and very difficult to demonstrate. But we now know them all to be the case. And, impressively, the likes of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Kepler were able to demonstrate them before we had even achieved flight, much less spaceflight. Now we can actually go and see for ourselves that space is mostly vacuum - but we knew it before we went, just because of a handful of really impressive thinkers who were able to interpret the very mixed signals we were getting from our observations, which were the result of our abnormal situation: On a planet with an atmosphere, in orbit around a star, and orbited by a large and nearby Moon.
Unless I'm mistaken, tidal forces are proportional to the square of gravity, or to the fourth power of distance. If they were proportional to gravity, Sun would be a bigger factor in Earth's tide than the moon is.
 
Unless I'm mistaken, tidal forces are proportional to the square of gravity, or to the fourth power of distance. If they were proportional to gravity, Sun would be a bigger factor in Earth's tide than the moon is.
you are mistaken. Tidal forces go as the inverse cube of distance. It’s not gravity squared but the differential gravity.
 
An object is radiating heat as EM energy while at the same tine is absorbing heat from the surrounding environment.

An object and its environment want to go to equilibrium.

Photons get murky. No mass but possessing momentum.

But the Earth is only absorbing heat from one direction. There may be a power equilibrium but not a directional one.
The red-shift/blue-shift effect applies to incoming photons too, not just outgoing ones -- the solar heating that hits the morning side of the daytime hemisphere is a little bit bluer than the solar heating that hits the afternoon side.
but both the morning and afternoon are absorbing energy from the sun (be it a little blue- or red-shifted as you say) while the night side is not. That’s the asymmetry to which I refer.
Do you know of a mechanism by which that asymmetry affects the spin of the object? I can see how it would push the object away from the sun, but I'd expect that to be neutral with respect to the object's rotational angular momentum.

When the earth then reradiates into space it’s more equally distributed.
I think that will depend on the object's size, temperature, thermal conductivity, shape, albedo, atmospheric CO2, yada yada. One aspect of the distribution that's well-studied is the Yarkovsky effect -- it's hotter in the afternoon than in the morning because of the time lag between absorption and reradiation, so the reradiation tends to push the object along in its orbit and make it spiral outward. It's measurable on small asteroids.
 
Back
Top Bottom