If the kinetic and potential energy in a system are equal, then the potential energy increases. What happens as a resul

1 answer:

7 0

-- If the system is 'closed', then nothing ... including energy ... can get in or out, and the total energy inside has to be constant.

If half of the energy in the system starts out as potential energy and the rest starts out as kinetic, and then the potential energy increases, there's only one place the increase could have come from ... it could only have been converted from kinetic energy. So the kinetic energy in the system must decrease.

In fact, this isn't even a "result". The kinetic energy has to decrease before the potential energy can increase, because that's where the increase has to come from.

If the system is 'open', then energy can come in and go out. If the potential energy inside suddenly increases, we don't know where it came from, so we can't say anything about what happens to the system.

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dexar [7]

The Answer is B as it is the only reasonable answer that favors Nuclear Energy.

3 0

4 years ago

In which medium does light travel faster: one with a critical angle of 27.0° or one with a critical angle of 32.0°? Explain. (Fo

Eddi Din [679]

Answer:

Among those two medium, light would travel faster in the one with a reflection angle of $32^{\circ}$ (when light enters from the air.)

Explanation:

Let $v_{1}$ denote the speed of light in the first medium. Let $v_{\text{air}}$ denote the speed of light in the air. Assume that the light entered the boundary at an angle of $\theta_{1}$ to the normal and exited with an angle of $\theta_{\text{air}}$ . By Snell's Law, the sine of $\theta_{1}\!$ and $\theta_{\text{air}}\!$ would be proportional to the speed of light in the corresponding medium. In other words:

$\displaystyle \frac{v_{1}}{v_{\text{air}}} = \frac{\sin(\theta_{1})}{\sin(\theta_{\text{air}})}$ .

When light enters a boundary at the critical angle $\theta_{c}$ , total internal reflection would happen. It would appear as if the angle of refraction is now $90^{\circ}$ . (in this case, $\theta_{\text{air}} = 90^{\circ}$ .)

Substitute this value into the Snell's Law equation:

$\begin{aligned}\frac{v_{1}}{v_{\text{air}}} &= \frac{\sin(\theta_{1})}{\sin(\theta_{\text{air}})} \\ &= \frac{\sin(\theta_{c})}{\sin(90^{\circ})} \\ &= \sin(\theta_{c})\end{aligned}$ .

Rearrange to obtain an expression for the speed of light in the first medium:

$v_{1} = v_{\text{air}} \cdot \sin(\theta_{1})$ .

The speed of light in a medium (with the speed of light slower than that in the air) would be proportional to the critical angle at the boundary between this medium and the air.

For $0 < \theta < 90^{\circ}$ , $\sin(\theta)$ is monotonically increasing with respect to $\theta$ . In other words, for $\!\theta$ in that range, the value of $\sin(\theta)\!$ increases as the value of $\theta\!$ increases.

Therefore, compared to the medium in this question with $\theta_{c} = 27^{\circ}$ , the medium with the larger critical angle $\theta_{c} = 32^{\circ}$ would have a larger $\sin(\theta_{c})$ . such that light would travel faster in that medium.