Quote:
Originally Posted by ak_aramis
Stop right there - you're quite wrong there. Fusion is a net energy loss above iron; the radium's radiation is literally releasing the energy used to create it, and it's glow is a mixture of its radioactivity and stored light in the form of excited electrons.
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That is not how it was understood in the 19th century, when "matter" and "energy" were understood as entirely separate phenomena, each of which was separately conserved.
As the nineteenth century understood it, the energy the radium emitted was coming out of nowhere. I am well aware of the twentieth century post-Einstein understanding of the matter—that was why I wrote, "it's a generalization of those laws to include mass-energy conversion as an energy source." But I didn't see a way to make the point that rather than abandoning the Law of Conservation of Energy, the twentieth century adopted a more general version of it, without stating how the matter looked to physicists in 1900, when they observed phenomena that violated the laws of thermodynamics as they understood them.
And that's relevant here because, if you came up with a novel physical phenomenon that allowed heat to disappear without being conducted, convected, or radiated, it could equally well lead to a more generalized conservation law; the process might no more violate the laws of thermodynamics than the emissions of radium violated those laws.