Stephen Lawrence writes, > AFAIK that doesn't violate anything else in the three laws -- only the > footnote is violated.... Note, however, that it certainly *does* violate > conservation of energy.... But conservation of energy is also *not* an > assumption of Newtonian mechanics; it's a theorem.
Yes but once again, Stephen - it should be mentioned (& since you are a self-described nit-picker deluxe, you should not complain too vociferously) that the 800 pound gorilla in the closet... ... the one which is always stinking up the place when so-called "conservation of energy" is invoked in this kind of discussion - is zero point energy. Either ZPE is a source of energy or it is not. If it is a source of energy, then so-called "conservation of energy" cannot be violated, unless ZPE is exhausted. Which - according to some very erudite sources - is pretty darn hard to do .... Jones To wit: no less an authority than John Archibald Wheeler (who died earlier this year) promoted something along the lines of: ZPE pervades our universe and is omni-directional within it. The energy density of the ZPE is much higher than nuclear energy (seventy orders of magnitude greater). For most purposes, the amount of energy in ZPE is infinite, but the amount which is useful to us in 3-space is surely much less. While the ZPE is electromagnetic in nature, quantum theory suggests that it does not arise from electromagnetic propagation in our 3-space but arises from what can be described as an orthogonal flux from a higher spatial dimension. Many of us like to merge Wheeler with another great mind - Dirac - and suggest that the spatial dimension where ZPE resides be called "reciprocal space" and/or the so-called "epo field". As to whether ZPE can be easily "tapped" or not, that is another question which should not diminish the basic "meaninglessness" of invoking so-called "conservation of energy" ... which is the most common ploy of skeptics of almost anything which is of interest on this forum. And that is why I am subject to mention the above few lines as kind of a "boilerplate" pronouncement whenever "conservation of energy" is invoked.
