![]() ![]() However, in scientific usage, a conserved quantity for a system stays constant, changes by a definite amount that is transferred to other systems, and/or is converted into other forms of that quantity. Bring these atoms together to form a molecule and you create water dissociate the atoms in such a molecule and you destroy water. Water is composed of molecules consisting of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. (The same comment is also true about the scientific and everyday uses of the word ‘work.’) In everyday usage, you could conserve water by not using it, or by using less of it, or by re-using it. The terms ‘conserved quantity’ and ‘conservation law’ have specific, scientific meanings in physics, which are different from the everyday meanings associated with the use of these words. The last section of this chapter provides a preview. As you continue to examine other topics in physics, in later chapters of this book, you will see how this conservation law is generalized to encompass other types of energy and energy transfers. This will lead us to a discussion of the important principle of the conservation of mechanical energy. In this section, we elaborate and extend the result we derived in Potential Energy of a System, where we re-wrote the work-energy theorem in terms of the change in the kinetic and potential energies of a particle.
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