Conservation of energy in the context of "Energy consumption"

Energy (from Ancient Greek ἐνέργεια (enérgeia) 'activity') is the quantitative property that is transferred to a body or to a physical system, recognizable in the performance of work and in the form of heat and light. Energy is a conserved quantity—the law of conservation of energy states that energy can be converted in form, but not created or destroyed. The unit of measurement for energy in the International System of Units (SI) is the joule (J).

Forms of energy include the kinetic energy of a moving object, the potential energy stored by an object (for instance due to its position in a field), the elastic energy stored in a solid object, chemical energy associated with chemical reactions, the radiant energy carried by electromagnetic radiation, the internal energy contained within a thermodynamic system, and rest energy associated with an object's rest mass. These are not mutually exclusive.

The electron neutrino (ν
_e) is an elementary particle which has zero electric charge and a spin of 1⁄2. Together with the electron, it forms the first generation of leptons, hence the name electron neutrino. It was first hypothesized by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930, to account for missing momentum and missing energy in beta decay, and was discovered in 1956 by a team led by Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines (see Cowan–Reines neutrino experiment).

Energy transformation, also known as energy conversion, is the process of changing energy from one form to another. In physics, energy is a quantity that provides the capacity to perform work (e.g. lifting an object) or provides heat. In addition to being converted, according to the law of conservation of energy, energy is transferable to a different location or object or living being, but it cannot be created or destroyed.

The internal energy of a thermodynamic system is the energy of the system as a state function, measured as the quantity of energy necessary to bring the system from its standard internal state to its present internal state of interest, accounting for the gains and losses of energy due to changes in its internal state, including such quantities as magnetization. It excludes the kinetic energy of motion of the system as a whole and the potential energy of position of the system as a whole, with respect to its surroundings and external force fields. It includes the thermal energy, i.e., the constituent particles' kinetic energies of motion relative to the motion of the system as a whole. Without a thermodynamic process, the internal energy of an isolated system cannot change, as expressed in the law of conservation of energy, a foundation of the first law of thermodynamics. The notion has been introduced to describe the systems characterized by temperature variations, temperature being added to the set of state parameters, the position variables known in mechanics (and their conjugated generalized force parameters), in a similar way to potential energy of the conservative fields of force, gravitational and electrostatic. Its author is Rudolf Clausius. Without transfer of matter, internal energy changes equal the algebraic sum of the heat transferred and the work done. In systems without temperature changes, internal energy changes equal the work done by/on the system.

The internal energy cannot be measured absolutely. Thermodynamics concerns changes in the internal energy, not its absolute value. The processes that change the internal energy are transfers, into or out of the system, of substance, or of energy, as heat, or by thermodynamic work. These processes are measured by changes in the system's properties, such as temperature, entropy, volume, electric polarization, and molar constitution. The internal energy depends only on the internal state of the system and not on the particular choice from many possible processes by which energy may pass into or out of the system. It is a state variable, a thermodynamic potential, and an extensive property.

The second law of thermodynamics is a physical law based on universal empirical observation concerning heat and energy interconversions. A simple statement of the law is that heat always flows spontaneously from hotter to colder regions of matter (or 'downhill' in terms of the temperature gradient). Another statement is: "Not all heat can be converted into work in a cyclic process." These are informal definitions, however; more formal definitions appear below.

The second law of thermodynamics establishes the concept of entropy as a physical property of a thermodynamic system. It predicts whether processes are forbidden despite obeying the requirement of conservation of energy as expressed in the first law of thermodynamics and provides necessary criteria for spontaneous processes. For example, the first law allows the process of a cup falling off a table and breaking on the floor, as well as allowing the reverse process of the cup fragments coming back together and 'jumping' back onto the table, while the second law allows the former and denies the latter. The second law may be formulated by the observation that the entropy of isolated systems left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease, as they always tend toward a state of thermodynamic equilibrium where the entropy is highest at the given internal energy. An increase in the combined entropy of system and surroundings accounts for the irreversibility of natural processes, often referred to in the concept of the arrow of time.

In vector calculus and physics, a vector field is an assignment of a vector to each point in a space, most commonly Euclidean space ${\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{n}}$. A vector field on a plane can be visualized as a collection of arrows with given magnitudes and directions, each attached to a point on the plane. Vector fields are often used to model, for example, the speed and direction of a moving fluid throughout three dimensional space, such as the wind, or the strength and direction of some force, such as the magnetic or gravitational force, as it changes from one point to another point.

The elements of differential and integral calculus extend naturally to vector fields. When a vector field represents force, the line integral of a vector field represents the work done by a force moving along a path, and under this interpretation conservation of energy is exhibited as a special case of the fundamental theorem of calculus. Vector fields can usefully be thought of as representing the velocity of a moving flow in space, and this physical intuition leads to notions such as the divergence (which represents the rate of change of volume of a flow) and curl (which represents the rotation of a flow).

Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (/ˈpɔːli/ PAW-lee; German: [ˈpaʊ̯li] ; 25 April 1900 – 15 December 1958) was an Austrian–Swiss theoretical physicist and a pioneer of quantum mechanics. In 1945, after having been nominated by Albert Einstein, Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the Exclusion Principle, also called the Pauli Principle". The discovery involved spin theory, which is the basis of a theory of the structure of matter.

To preserve the conservation of energy in beta decay, Pauli proposed the existence of a small neutral particle, dubbed the neutrino by Enrico Fermi, in 1930. Neutrinos were first detected in 1956.

In surface science, surface energy (also interfacial free energy or surface free energy) quantifies the disruption of intermolecular bonds that occurs when a surface is created. In solid-state physics, surfaces must be intrinsically less energetically favorable than the bulk of the material (that is, the atoms on the surface must have more energy than the atoms in the bulk), otherwise there would be a driving force for surfaces to be created, removing the bulk of the material by sublimation. The surface energy may therefore be defined as the excess energy at the surface of a material compared to the bulk, or it is the work required to build an area of a particular surface. Another way to view the surface energy is to relate it to the work required to cut a bulk sample, creating two surfaces. There is "excess energy" as a result of the now-incomplete, unrealized bonding between the two created surfaces.

Cutting a solid body into pieces disrupts its bonds and increases the surface area, and therefore increases surface energy. If the cutting is done reversibly, then conservation of energy means that the energy consumed by the cutting process will be equal to the energy inherent in the two new surfaces created. The unit surface energy of a material would therefore be half of its energy of cohesion, all other things being equal; in practice, this is true only for a surface freshly prepared in vacuum. Surfaces often change their form away from the simple "cleaved bond" model just implied above. They are found to be highly dynamic regions, which readily rearrange or react, so that energy is often reduced by such processes as passivation or adsorption.