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Thanks for answering my questions! How would it be possible to transfer energy wirelessly? Energy such as kinetic energy or gravitational energy? Any information would be helpful, I really hope you can tell me how or where I can get information to be able to transfer those types of energies, or in what types of situations that could be done.
Question Date: 2007-10-24
Answer 1:

You're very welcome!

Energy can be transferred wirelessly. For example, the sun transfers energy to the earth without wires, but instead uses light. Sun light is composed of many frequencies, or 'colors' of light. As you may know, if you have light of all the visible colors (red, green and blue) you will see white light as we see from sunlight. Some light from the sun we can see (the red green and blue) and some we cannot because our eyes do not sense these frequencies or 'colors'. An example of invisible (to us) light is UV or ultraviolet light, which as you know can be bad for our skin, so we use sunscreen to block these 'colors'.

We (people) can transfer energy in a similar way. Consider if you had a light source (a light bulb will do) plugged into an outlet in the wall. The light is emitting energy, very similar to the sun only much less. If we put a solar cell nearby, we can harvest this light emitted from the light bulb and power something else. A solar cell or photovoltaic device is the same thing you see in some calculators or on rooftops that use the sun's light to give us electricity. This is one way we can transmit energy wirelessly.

Check this out; there is some information on wikipedia that explains things as well. If there are some words in here that you don't understand, try looking them up too! You'll find that if you keep reading about something, you'll eventually know quite a lot about it.

Great questions!

Answer 2:

There are many forms of energy, and energy transfer is a common phenomenon among them.In physics, there is something called conservation of energy which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. This means that energy can't just go away and instead, it needs to be converted to another form in order not to violate this conservation law. Two typical energies are kinetic (energy in motion) and potential (stored energy). Have you ever been on a roller coaster and wondered how it worked? Well, a roller coaster is an excellent example that illustrates the concept of kinetic and potential energy transfer.

So imagine you are on a wooden roller coaster, you gain potential energy when the cart lifts to the top of the hill. The higher the hill, the more potential energy is gained because potential energy is correlated to gravity. At the top of the hill, no energy is produced, but all that stored energy needs to go somewhere... this is when the big drop comes in handy! As the cart accelerates down the hill, potential energy is converted to kinetic energy. Similar to what happens at the top of the hill, no energy is generated at the bottom of the hill.

So how is the cart then able to go up another hill? Well, so much kinetic energy was built up as the cart accelerated down the hill that only a small amount of potential energy is required to go up another hill. This is just one example among many that shows how energy is converted from one form to another. Other examples include pendulums, dropping objects, and driving a car on hills.

thanks!


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