Sjack Abeling Gravity Wheel and the Worlds first Weight Power Plant

[Low-Q]

  Hi Vidar,
A mass following a llinear path has momentum. This gives the mass a value greater than m*v.
If the kinetic energy of the momentum can be converted, then overunity might be possible.
One problem with a masss moving in a straight line, sooner or later it will have to stop or change directions.


                                                                                      Jim

Yes, but what hand did place the potential energy in that mass in the first place.

Vidar

[petersone]

Hi All
As I understand it,the shorter the time anything goes from A to B,the more energy it consumes,as both balls start with the same energy,how come the "valley" ball gets to the end before the "straight" ball? I wonder if the balls are identical,I don't think they were shown changed around.
peter

[Cloxxki]

Hi All
As I understand it,the shorter the time anything goes from A to B,the more energy it consumes,as both balls start with the same energy,how come the "valley" ball gets to the end before the "straight" ball? I wonder if the balls are identical,I don't think they were shown changed around.
peter

Peter, it's about which ball gets up to speed first (allowed to swap height for speed). The ball that started down a steeper track before going level, will head into the level part with greater speed, and thus easily makes up the lost horizontal time. As nothing is slowing it down, the hor. advantage can be extended, depending on the length of the track.

If there's a really wide valley between 2 mountain peaks of identical height, fastest rail track would not be horizontal, would not follow the mountain faces, but follow the mountain faces and go deep underground for the valley section. More time is made up by going fast for long, than it takes to cover the extra meters of steep track.

[fletcher]

Another metaphor to help visualize what happens for those that might care - many would have watched the winter Olympics just finished - there were parallel slalom racing for snowboarders & skiers - two contestants raced twice, swapping left & right downhill tracks & the fastest combined time won the heat.

Commentators often commented that one track was faster than the other - but how many who watched thought about why that would be so ? - all else being equal i.e. windage factor, body mass, snow conditions etc then the track with the most steep parts was the faster track - i.e. more steeper bits & more flat glides translates to arriving at the finish line in less time - they didn't arrive with a faster velocity, just got there quicker [average velocity] - same as the brachistochrome experiments showed.

An additional bit of information as an aside - heavier skiers also tend to get down a track quicker, if it doesn't have sharp turns for example - this is on the same track - the reason in this case is that the gravity force is pulling the skiers downhill - all mass accelerates at the same rate regardless of that mass - but there are losses or forces opposing the acceleration of gravity - these are frictional losses, one of the largest being air drag - a more massive skier accelerates the same as a lighter one but reaches a faster terminal velocity because the percentage of windage losses is less compared to the lighter skier - that's why they wear skin suits to reduce windage & maximise net acceleration - of course this advantage is often engineered out to even the playing field by having lots of sharp turns because more massive skiers have more inertia & have to dig their edges in harder to get around a tight turn which slows them down - lighter skiers don't have the same top velocity but can manoeuvre faster so their average speed is just as fast on a well designed slalom & that makes the contest as fair as possible.

[Omnibus]

@fletcher,

Your last text again doesn't help in explaining as to why two balls with equal gravitational potential energy clearly convert it into two different amounts of kinetic energy thus apparently violating the second, "transformation", part of CoE (violation of the first, "conservation", part has already been proven definitively earlier). Just giving examples with slaloms and reconfirming that transformation of a given amount of potential energy into other kinds of energy is construction dependent isn't addressing the main issue.