Re: Energy, etc

["John S. Denker" <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

At 11:26 AM 8/3/99 -0600, Jim Green wrote:
> "Energy" is not "located"  It does not "flow".  It is not like water,
> as Leigh says.  Energy is a property of a system.

1) Do you have any experimental or theoretical evidence for this assertion?
 Even if it were true, I don't see how you could prove it.  It's hard to
prove a negative.  Just because *you* don't know how to localize it doesn't
mean it can't be localized.

2) Formulas involving energy density appear in many branches of physics.
Are you asserting that they're all wrong?

3) The law of conservation of energy is a *local* conservation law.
Without locality, conservation is almost meaningless;  if the conserved
quantity disappeared from the region under observation, one could always
weasel out of the  violation by asserting that a corresponding amount of
energy "must have" appeared in a distant, unobserved part of the system.
In fact though, energy cannot move from point A to point B without flowing
across a boundary that we place between A and B.

I'll say it again: energy must be localized and must flow.  Otherwise we
can just give up on energy conservation.