I don't think that the argument between Icewolf and David Ashton is going to be resolved by silly old me. I have a feeling it will at the very least take a post from someone that they mutually respect and deem an expert in the field. All of that said, I do want to make some statements of my own. I feel that there is a
bit of a semantic problem.
The First Law basically says that energy or matter can neither be created nor destroyed. In terms of the machine, this meant that the total energy output (work by the machine) is equal to the heat supplied. In other words, the change in the internal energy of a closed
system is equal to the heat added to the
system minus the work done by the
system. Because the
system operates in the real world, some energy always escapes into the outside world, thus leading to both inefficiency and the Second Law, which was generated to
cover the so-called flaw in the First Law.
This statement, that David Ashton so blatantly plagiarized from this website
Three Laws of Thermodynamics - Physics Planet .com
paragraph 5, I think is using the word heat to describe the internal energy of a
system. It does not mean the kind of heat we are use to in everyday life. I.e. It does not follow that if you pointed a hair dryer at a motor, it would start turning.
Heat, work, and energy are all really the same thing in physics terms. They are all measured in Joules, or Newton-meters.
This leads to my second
point,
This is Newtons first law of thermodynamics, and unlike Icewolfs law of thermodynamics, heat can absolutely do work,
it is the heat measured in Watts which heats the
filament and produces the light, no semantics can get around that absolute fact.
Heat is most absolutely not measured in watts. Like I said, heat is measured in Joules. Watts is the
unit of measure of
power, or a
Joule per second. While related, you are completely disregarding time.
It is true that while electricity is flowing through the
filament it is the resistance of the, in most cases we are talking about
tungsten, that causes the
filament to produce radiation. The wavelength of this radiation starts out fairly large and all that we (humans) perceive is heat. As more and more energy is pumped into the
filament the radiation that is produced becomes of a higher and higher frequency and we feel it getting hotter and hotter. Up to a certain
point, all of the radiation produced in
infrared. After that
point, the frequency of the radiation reaches the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, which we refer to as light.
In actuality it is all the same thing, heat and light, we just refer to the heat as a waste, or byproduct, because it is the light that we are after.
As for your resistors, there are many different reasons why they don't light up. I feel silly even having to explain this, but one is because your resistors aren't in a vacuum (or gas such as
halogen) envelop. The heat produced by the resistance will deteriorate the material long before they get hot enough to glow.
Please feel free to add any constructive criticism of how I described the process, but at least try to use proper definitions that can be found in any dictionary.
-Tim
