sophiecentaur,
Q=CV
and E=CV2/2
Are written in a totally arbitrary form and can be re-arranged in any way you choose. They say nothing about the relative significances of the quantities involved. That is just in your head.
Those formulas say everything about the quantitative significances of the quantities involved.
The reason that a VDG generator works is that the sphere has Capacitance wrt Earth and a charge builds up on it. No sphere, no build up of charge. And where does this charge come from? By displacing an equal and opposite amount of charge to earth. You could charge a paper capacitor in a similar way, with a rolling belt but the voltage you could achieve would be much less - that's the only difference. You clearly don't want to accept anything that goes against your argument about no charge being stored but, as Jim says, there are very very few instances where a charge is built up on something without a similar opposite charge ending up somewhere else. Can you think of one? An Ion Drive, perhaps?
I keep repeating that I said the
net charge does not change. If a charge builds up in one place and an opposite charge builds up in another place, then the net charge is zero, isn't it?
I don;t think you can know what "conflating" means - I mean that the Charge on a capacitor and the Charging vs Energising argument are totally different issues and you are treating them as one.
Yes, I do know what conflate means. If I did not, I could look it up in a dictionary. They are not totally different. The first above is what the charge separation is, and the second is how it got that way. So what is the point?
Just reiterating that you are somehow right about the Energise thing gets you nowhere. The only references you have given have been non-learned web pages which have been associated, mainly with Power Engineering situations.
You clearly didn't catch on to what I was getting at but every student I have ever talked to would have understood immediately what I am referring to and I think all other readers would, too.
I never said that describing a capacitor as being energized doesn't get you anywhere. Energizing is correct no matter what the application of a capacitor is.
That's no argument at all.
It is not an argument, it is a statement of fact.
Science is not "common sense". Much more is needed than common sense.
No one said common sense was everything in science.
Common sense tells us that things fall to the ground (no Science there). It tells us that "Nature abhors a vacuum" (common 'experience' but no explanation of what's happening).
Common sense does not tell us those two things. Those are observable phenomena. Common sense is how one arranges and relates facts into a coherent principle.
If Einstein had ended his paper on Special Relativity with the argument that it's "common sense", people would have laughted because that is the last thing it is. If you don't want to relate what you write to scholarly articles then you are wasting your time on PF. Read the guidelines. It is one of the strong points of PF that we don't hold forth about unsupported theories.
Not unless Einstein showed how common sense applied to his theories, which he did mathematically and descriptively. But I did not propose a theory, I proposed a change in nomenclature, and explained why it was better. So far, no one has shown it to be wrong. I only see vague statements from detractors like "everyone says it the old <wrong> way", or "that is what they said <wrongly> in the beginning".
wow. Is there a reason why all the capacitor tanks have low voltage (sub 9V)?