2 ms·
Hijacking this thread in hope that some fellow physicist could chime in. I'm physicist myself so maybe I should know this or be able to figure it out myself bu
by _Microft 7y ago
Hijacking this thread in hope that some fellow physicist could chime in.
I'm physicist myself so maybe I should know this or be able to figure it out myself but here's the question:
Where is kinetic or rotational energy 'stored'?
Is it eventually the transformation of fields that gives rise to kinetic energy? For example an electron whose electric field is not a radially symmetric must be a moving electron and the difference in energy between the field configurations (simple radially symmetric electric field on one hand and the mix of electric and magnetic fields on the other) is exactly the kinetic energy it has?
- selimthegrim 7y agoYou have hit upon the so called Abraham Minkowski paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham–Minkowski_controversy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham–Minkowski_controvers...
- knzhou 7y agoThe electromagnetic field configuration does contribute energy/momentum. In general, every field that interacts with the election field contributes: an “electron” stands for a complicated joint excitation of the electron, photon, W/Z boson, quark, gluon, ... quantum fields and what we call the momentum/energy of the electron is just the total of that of all of these fields.