Silly question about capacitors

[MileHigh]

Farmhand:

Same thing with two 10000 liter water tanks side by side, one empty one full, if you let the full one equalize with the empty one, the same amount of water is there. None wasted. If you want all the water in the first tank just leave it there.

No water is wasted but you have lost one half of the GPE of the water.  It has all turned into heat.  There is no point in challenging the premise of the experiment, it is a given.

MileHigh

[TinselKoala]

My undertanding is stored energy is potential energy and energy at work is kinetic energy.

..

I made a P.S. to my last post.

Sure, OK. I was just trying to make the point that the equation has the same form (and for the same reason if you look at the full derivation) as the formula for KE of a moving mass. The energy on a capacitor can also be expressed as QV/2 where Q is the charge in Coulombs. This is more analogous to "potential energy", as it is linear in voltage.

[Farmhand]

Farmhand:

No water is wasted but you have lost one half of the GPE of the water.  It has all turned into heat.  There is no point in challenging the premise of the experiment, it is a given.

MileHigh

WHo is challenging the premise of the experiment. I helping to explain in layman's terms. Why energy is expended and where. How it can be a more efficient expenditure or not.

Look what I also wrote.

With no reason to do a thing it is always a loss. It's like making a big high stack of bricks then leveling it out into two shorter stacks it takes energy to make the big stack into the two small stacks. It cannot do itself, something must do it.

Cheers

P.S. Imagine making one tall stack of bricks by hand then changing that to two shorter stacks, does that take no energy to do ? No you must expend energy to get from state one to state two. Then if you want to make the two stacks back into one tall one you must expend more energy again. It's really quite simple. The amount of brick remains the same.

Also the higher the stack gets the harder it becomes to add another brick to the top of the stack.  It depends on how you take them down and if you store the energy or not when you do it as to how much loss is involved.

So I'm not saying energy is not expended.

Tinsel, I get ya, energy is energy, I probably didn't word my post well. There is no assurance that the potential energy will be converted into "wanted work" at any specific efficiency.

Cheers

[Farmhand]

Farmhand:

No water is wasted but you have lost one half of the GPE of the water.  It has all turned into heat.  There is no point in challenging the premise of the experiment, it is a given.

MileHigh

Well yes of course. It would take an additional input of energy to equalize the water "up" to a level with the same top height as the first one. In other words equalize "up" (rather than equalize down) and the GPE would then be increased.  That's just common sense.

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[MarkE]

Farmhand:

No water is wasted but you have lost one half of the GPE of the water.  It has all turned into heat.  There is no point in challenging the premise of the experiment, it is a given.

MileHigh

And this is of course the problem that our friend webby can't bring himself to see with the scenario he set up in defense of our favorite investor funds funeral director Mr. Wayne.