sophiecentaur said:
That is not what I said (or at least meant to say). Work is done but not 'on' the ends if the 'ends' of the wire are taken to be where the wire enters or exits the moving drums. At each end of the wire there is force and there is motion (but not motion of the string).
This much is not quite incorrect. Just misguided.
sophiecentaur said:
This is just the same as when a car drives up hill or accelerates. Earth stays still but the wheels turn and work is done.
This part is flatly wrong.
In the rest frame of the Earth (or, equivalently, the rest frame of the contact patch on the tires) zero work is done by the Earth on the tires. And zero work is done by the tires on the Earth.
The wheels turn, yes. But that does not affect the work done across the interface between tires and road. The work done across that interface is zero.
If you want to look for work done, you will need to look more closely. The wheel is exerting forward force on the frame of the car. Work is being done there. Meanwhile, the axle is exerting torque on the wheel. Work is being done there. Ideally, the net work done on the wheel is zero. In the real world, rolling resistance causes the wheel to dissipate mechanical energy internally, so really, the wheel absorbs positive net work. That is an invariant.
We could chase the energy flow through the drive train to the engine. The engine exerts torque on the drive shaft doing work across that interface. The countering torque is from the motor mounts which do not rotate. So no work is done there. The motor is a net energy source. This is an invariant.
sophiecentaur said:
You have to allow work to be done somewhere or energy can't be transferred.
But in the rest frame of the cable, energy is not transferred. Nor is work done on or by the cable.
Work
is done somewhere in this frame. I know where.
@A.T. knows where. We want you to figure it out.
sophiecentaur said:
This justifies my worry that the 'on or by' adverbs are often a needless confusion in this sort of scenario.
The supposed justification is lacking.
I will grant you that those adverbs are often unnecessary and are eliminated for brevity. For instance, if a team of horses is pulling a plow through a field and the student is asked for the work is done over the length of a furrow, we are clearly asking for the work done by team on plow.
It would not be amiss if the student multiplied the furrow length by its cross-section, multiplied by the height to which the soil had been raised above its prior resting place and then multiplied by the local acceleration of gravity. That would give the work done by plow on soil and would miss the energy dissipated by friction between plowshare and earth.
sophiecentaur said:
I appreciate that but I have only allowed the drums to move relative to the wire so how am I frame jumping?
Do you understand how work is defined? It appears that you do not.
Work is the vector dot product of the force across an interface and the displacement of the
material of the target object at the interface.
In the case of work done by Earth on tires, the tire material at the contact patch has zero displacement parallel to the road. Zero work is done by road on tires.
In the case of work done by tires on Earth, the road material at the contact footprint has zero displacement parallel to the road. Zero work is done by tires on road.
In the case of work done by drum on wire, the wire material at the contact point(s) has zero displacement parallel to the wire. Zero work is done by drum on wire.
In the case of work done by wire on drum, the drum material at the contact point(s) has zero displacement parallel to the circumference of the drum. Zero work is done by wire on drum.
In the rest frame of the wire it is a simple fact that the drum does zero work on the wire.
sophiecentaur said:
I could be struggling with this because there is a causal chain involved with coal being burned on shore and the torpedo is being pulled along through the water. The on shore drum is moving along the wire and the torpedo is moving along the wire. Merely stating a fact about use of frames can hardly change that - can it?
Nothing that anyone has said here denies the causal chain.
We are looking at energy flows, not causation chains or information flows. They are not at all the same thing.
Energy flows are frame relative. We could talk about momentum flows, angular momentum flows or information flows instead. But we should be clear on which one we are analyzing.