Richard Clark wrote:
On Wed, 07 Nov 2007 11:41:29 -0500, (J. B. Wood)
Hi John,
I majored in English. Yet and all that intellectually crippled, I
found you couldn't respond to heat (the expression of power by your
own choice) being the dissipation of energy in a load, and that energy
is the entity that propagates - not power.
As the topic has migrated away from your original thesis of heat and
the sun towards fields; I, as an English major, am at a loss to
discover the correlation that resolves how fields can resurrect the
missing heat in an Earth equivalent volume of space, or provide the
surplus heat found in a smaller volume of the moon - all from the same
source of those fields, the sun.
Are fields selectively powerful (like a god)? Do the fields of
Hello, Richard and all.
With regard to power (be it from the sun or some other source of
energy), strictly speaking I would agree that what is transported is
energy. Physicists and engineers usually include the ability to do work
(as well as the work itself) as part of the concept of power. For
example, we can have "available power" at the terminals of a receiving
antenna even though the antenna is not connected to a dissipating
termination. Radio/antenna engineers and physicists also use the
concept of "power density" (usually in units of watts per square meter)
at some distance from a transmitting antenna. We then speak of an
antenna having an effective "capture area" that can extract a portion of
this power from incident electromagnetic waves.
In this regard we speak of power being transmitted through a medium. If
we clock energy flow across a boundary for a specified time then the
quantity of energy divided by that time represents power flow across the
boundary.
With regard to the sun/volume question I'm not qualified to answer that.
The earth still retains its primordial inner sources of heat and
other forms of energy as manifiested in erupting volcanoes, geysers, and
deep sea thermal vents. Of course these are in addition to radiant
energy from the sun. Sincerely,