pierre curie devised the law of conservation of energy.
pierre curie devised the law of conservation of energy.
who devised the law of conservation of energy?
pierre curie
Na
Na
although in the early 18th century the concepts of force and momentum had been long understood, the idea of "energy" as transferable between different systems was still in its infancy, and would not be fully resolved until the 19th century. it is now accepted that the total mechanical momentum of a system is conserved and none is lost to friction. simply put, there is no 'momentum friction' and momentum can not transfer between different forms, and particularly there is no potential momentum. emmy noether later proved this to be true for all problems where the initial state is symmetric in generalized coordinates. mechanical energy, kinetic and potential, may be lost to another form, but the total is conserved in time. the du châtelet contribution was the hypothesis of the conservation of total energy, as distinct from momentum. in doing so, she became the first person in history to elucidate the concept of energy as such, and to quantify its relationship to mass and velocity based on her own empirical studies. inspired by the theories of gottfried leibniz, she repeated and publicized an experiment originally devised by willem 's gravesande in which balls were dropped from different heights into a sheet of soft clay. each ball's kinetic energy - as indicated by the quantity of material displaced - was shown to be proportional to the square of the velocity. the deformation of the clay was found to be directly proportional to the height the balls were dropped from, equal to the initial potential energy. earlier workers, such as newton and voltaire, had all believed that "energy" (so far as they understood the concept at all) was indistinct from momentum and therefore proportional to velocity. according to this understanding, the deformation of the clay should have been proportional to the square root of the height from which the balls were dropped. in classical physics the correct formula is formula_1, where formula_2 is the kinetic energy of an object, formula_3 its mass and formula_4 its speed.) energy must always have the same dimensions in any form, which is necessary to be able to relate it in different forms (kinetic, potential, heat…). newton's work assumed the exact conservation of only mechanical momentum. a broad range of mechanical problems are soluble only if energy conservation is included. the collision and scattering of two point masses is one of them. leonhard euler and joseph-louis lagrange established a more formal framework for mechanics using the results of du châtelet.
émilie du châtelet