The potential energy of the spring is “stored” in individual molecules that are pushed into some configuration that they don’t quite want to be in, and they exert force on each other trying to push themselves back apart / back together into being the way they like. As the spring disintegrates, you could model those individual forces, and molecules exerting force on each other would release it into kinetic energy one by one or in groups, as the spring gradually lost its integrity to exist as a singular entity.
(I think that in practice, metals are made of grains, big groupings of molecules which stay pretty much as rigid bodies unless something really crazy happens, so most of the potential energy is force of the grains wanting to go back into their preferred arrangement in relation to other grains. I.e. not in practice at the level of molecule to molecule. But I’m not 100% on that part.)
Depends. If the antennas were resonant dipoles placed some fraction of a wavelength away from each other (1/4 wave away), you may get some cancellation of the signal.
Look up the "yagi uda" antenna, it's the classic rooftop tv antenna. The elements are spaced by fractions of a wavelength to achieve directivity. One single element is driven, the others are just resonant lengths of wire.
People are answering what you asked but what you probably mean is in a 2d world where two antenna are perfectly in line with the transmitter will the first absorb some of the signal - yes it will, just like two wind turbines in a line it's absorbing the energy from the medium and using it to do work.
It's not always so simple, it might spit some of if out too if it doesn't have anywhere else for it to go and it'll do this in a certain pattern which can, depending on the distance and arrangement ,increase the signal received by the second one. This and similar principles are why you see so many odd shapes for antenna designs such as the many bars on a TV antenna which make it more directional.
It would turn scary if the atmosphere would become as dense as the core of a star. Then too, a lot of stuff depends on the type of star we're talking about. Are we talking about some wimpy red dwarf core density? Yeah, we'll fuse the hydrogen in the atmosphere/on the surface all right. U wanna fuse nitrogen? Oof. U'r gonna need a much bigger star than that.
So basically, to become scary, ur atmosphere would have to be a lot more dense than what it would be if it was fkin solid (like if the gases were literally solid). It wouldn't thus be an atmosphere.
You and the person on a chair on the beach next to you will both get sunburnt. In the same way, radio waves washing around your house or car interacts with everything, antenna or not.
Yeah, you're not going to get a self-sustaining reaction in Earth's atmosphere if it wasn't already hot and compressed enough that there would be a self-sustaining reaction happening anyway. It's just not a plausible concern. You only get self-sustaining fusion in stars, so Earth would have to be a star in this scenario.
I don't know what chain reaction exactly they were thinking of, but from modern fusion research, I believe we can confidently say that the atmosphere would need to be interior-of-a-large-star-level dense, and even then I'm not sure you'd get nitrogen fusing with anything without a lot of hydrogen or helium around. Nitrogen-nitrogen fusion seems extremely implausible for sure
Prolly the most relevant paragraph from the linked article for this discussion:
Today, especially after the detonation of the 50 MT Tsar hydrogen bomb on Novaya Zemlya in 1961, it is also experimentally verified that the danger of atmospheric or even oceanic ignition does not exist. Also, the experimental measurements obtained by Zucker and others demonstrate that the fusion probability is much smaller than the geometric cross-section for 14N+14N assumed by Teller and coworkers, further reducing the chances for such an event. Furthermore, the atmosphere is also heated only to temperatures of a few million degrees, so that the most efficient energies of the fusing nuclei are a few 100 keV and thus well below the Coulomb barrier and very much reduced by penetrability. These temperatures are noticeably lower than those in the late hydrostatic burning stages of massive stars.
Basically the temperature of the atmosphere is over an order of magnitude too low to have any chance of ignition (need 10s of millions of K), and the reaction rate is thus several orders of magnitude lower than the threshold.
i think the idea is that the part that already fused creates a blast wave that could create the conditions, including preassure required for more fusion. i have no idea if it's possible though.
Ham radio operator here: basically neither will happen because both don't really mean anything.
This is an imperfect analogy, but I think it will set you thinking in the right direction: If someone is blinking a flashlight at you, and you're sitting right next to another person, do both of you see the flashlight at 100% brightness, or do your eyes wrestle for the same light waves?
What does "pick up the signal at 100%" mean? Let's say me and my buddy are talking on our car radios, no repeaters just point-to-point. If we start off in the same parking lot, we can easily hear each other. If we start driving in opposite directions, we'll still hear each other just fine, until one of two things happens: We go on either side of a hill or far enough to be beyond the horizon, and then abruptly stop hearing each other, or the signal will fade in intensity until the background noise is louder.
If we get to that point where the signal is weak but still receivable, increasing output power of the transmitter, or switching to a directional antenna might help. People tend to think antenna gain is some magic that makes the radio louder, but it's not. A high gain antenna does the same thing that cupping your hand behind your ear or around your mouth does; it puts more of the energy that would have gone in different directions in the direction you need.
Without getting too far into antenna theory, I will say that yes having two antennas near each other can cause them to interfere with each other. "Wrestle for the same radio waves" isn't the way I would describe it. Antennas resonate with radio waves, it's like a tuning fork, if you play the note the tuning fork is tuned to, the tuning fork will start to vibrate and emit its own sound. If two antennas are quite close together, this can cause destructive interference. You can use the same principle to construct a high gain antenna; look up how yagi antennas work for more details.
possibly several things but my first thought is your body is acting like a capacitor to ground. I'm guessing you've noticed this on an FM radio or rabbit ears on a TV that probably weren't grounded well.
In some cases you're tuning (or detuning) the antenna capacitively.
On other cases, like if your tv gets interference when you're standing in part the room, there may be standing waves causing interference, as the rf is bouncing around your room.
To further your point, theorically, there is a voltage potential between any two objects. That's the capacitance. Better conductor, for the same surface area, create a bigger potential.
So when you tune/detune a signal with your presence near the antenna, it is because you are close enough to the antenna that the potential between you and the antenna affects the filter of the signal.
How do you think you are changing the resonant frequency? By modifying it's capacitive impedence, i.e. creating a capacitor with yourself and the antenna.
And you know what we call the difference of electric potential between two points? Voltage.
When you say that capacitance is geometry, you are right. The distance between two objects, be it you and an antenna or two planks of wood, affect the capacitive impedance.
As the distance increase between two surfaces, the capacitance diminishes and the voltage between the two increase, so that C=QV is always true.
The resonant frequency is determined by the impedence, i.e. capacitive and inductive impedence.
You can't affect inductive impedance of the antenna because you are not a coil and do not emit EMR. But you can change the capacitance between you and the antenna by moving closer or further away.
as the distance increases the capacitance reduces. But C=Q/V doesn't mean you're not inducing any potential into the antenna... You're adding to the load... C=ε*A/d is the equation that says capacitance will decrease with distance, but that isn't going to induce any voltage in this case.
yes this is what I'm saying.
in the very near field, conductive tissue, ie a body, will have Eddy currents. Your body has an ε term as well as σ. You can definitely load an antenna. The R term will dominate but there will be some effect on inductance.
How side-by-side are we talking? If the antennas are closer than their size, yeah, it won't necessarily work the same way because they'll act like one antenna. If they're too far apart for "near field" effects (or if your antenna was tiny relative to the wave to start with, like with AM radio) it won't matter, because the wave in question will just kind of ooze around any obstruction, and received power will just go with inverse square of distance to source again.
In practice, it's unlikely to matter so much how loud the signal is, because (unless you're using a crystal radio) you are definitely going to amplify it quite a lot before it's useful, anyway. More of concern is how loud it is relative to any random noise that's present, which is not so dependent on antenna area.
Edit: I suppose if it's between you and the source, it will dim the signal a tiny, tiny little bit. Not the way a bigger thing can cast a shadow, though; think more like a slightly dirty lens.
A laymans opinion on the challenge: Waves lose energy, and the exact placement of antennas will matter. I don't know what the mechanism is called, but we don't place wind turbines right next to each other. That is afaik because each turbine takes some of the energy out of a larger chunk of the wind-wave in an 'bubble' around it, so we place them with optimal distance according to efficiency of that mechanism. If I'm right the effect will probably be minimal.
Anyway, just a stab at an interesting thought..
Yep. It's called near field and far field in radio. In the far field you can approximate it as a beam from the transmitter, while in near field it's magnets and things can absolutely interact. You never want to put up a stand-alone antenna in the near field of something conductive. Those big tower antennas actually incorporate the ground as a critical part of their design, because of that and the non-negligible conductivity of ground water.
Radios receiving signals don't just siphon the signal off lol
What you're asking would only really happen with wireless Internet service and it's not because of the wireless signal, but because the overall bandwidth diminishes the more people connect to it.
Actually, the waves emitted by the radio tower are enough for a receiving device to generate a small electrical current just through the oscillations of the propagating signal.
The current produced in the antenna does (induce a field which goes on to) cancel the wave out a bit. Not enough to be noticeable in the far field, for a normal-sized antenna, but some. Conservation of energy, right?
It’s like solar energy. You either absorb it with a panel, or it goes to “waste”. You’re not really stealing it from someone else, as long as you’re not getting too much in the way
Usong your analogy i think Ops question was really if you have a stack of transparent solar panels will the panel below get less power and the answer is of course it will. If one antenna is behind another there will be a small reduction in the power of the signal reaching it, probably very small but with enough of them you could theoretically construct a faraday cage of sorts.
Yup. It's typically amplified quite a lot in the receiver, and the vast majority of power transmitted never is received, so it doesn't usually matter, but it's not a dumb question.
Imagine you are with a friend on the beach., side by side on the water and a big wave comes. Do you fell less pressure because your friends is by your side?
whether you feel less pressure, or whether there is less pressures, are two completely different things. the question was about 100% reception, and it's fair to ask, so far, no one's answered it, you know, scientifically.
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