Recent content by Herman Trivilino

Yup. Many students have an answer-making strategy, using it in the hopes of passing a class. They lack a sense-making strategy. Then, when an understanding is needed either later in the same course in or a more advanced course, they are left in a lurch.

Excellent answer to the OP's question. In principle it is indeed an issue of being practical. Overwhelmingly so.

Well, which is it? Fine or awful? Your "scripts" seem like a typical textbook to me. Sometimes they just don't match your learning style. What you do is use them as a reference. Then find a textbook that suits you better and use the reference to guide you towards which parts you need to study...

No. Based on the OP's response they contain course material. Plus, you never get more than one syllabus and the OP has referred to scripts, plural. But every issue raised here could easily be addressed if we could see at least one script. I have a pretty good idea of what's wrong, but let's...

Yes, but the OP's issue, as I understand it, is that "no forces" and "zero net force" are not the same.

Hmmm... That's a tough question. To investigate on your own you need a college-level introductory physics background before you can dig into hydraulics. I think you've already answered your own question:

You need at least two objects (usually modeled as particles) interacting with each other (via a conservative force) to have potential energy. So that's a two-object system for which that potential energy is at least part of the internal energy of that system. Therefore, consider a system...

Potential energy of one object is indeed zero. I agree with that but don't understand what you mean by an origin or by "another point". Perhaps you could give us an example? Right. That's consistent with the internal energy of a system including only interactions that are internal to the...

Have you considered a button on the home page, like the search button for example, that does the same thing as the link. Making the link easier to find would, I think, result in more people using it and being aware of it.

Well, sure. After all, statistical physics underpins all of thermodynamics. (It just occurred to me that that could be an answer to the OP's question!) I can imagine that similar things occur in, for example, molecular epitaxy. Surely they are not a violation of the 2nd Law because the concept...

I've had pretty good luck with them. Not so with the 18650's though. They seem to have declined in quality in the last few years. I stay away from the highest capacity ones, as it seems that high capacity rating is valid for just one cycle. A good quality charger is a must. Those cheap ones...

Conservation of energy was in serious danger of being abandoned when experiments by Curie seemed to show that radium salts were creating thermal energy with no identifiable source. The Einstein mass-energy equivalence came to the rescue. To the uninitiated this can all seem like a fabrication...

When Newton wrote about action and reaction he was referring to forces. It was the 1680's. The concept of energy, if it even existed at that time, was not anything like the fully-formed concept of today. As I told you before it wasn't until the 1800's that researchers formed the concept of...

The table doesn't move relative to the floor in any frame.

In the 19th century researchers unified two different different types of phenomena, mechanical interactions and thermal interactions, using the concept of energy. Thus was created the grand principle of conservation of energy known as the First Law of Thermodynamics, and is taught to all...