I have been asked to clarify what I mean by the phrase, 'a packet of energy' used on my website at http://www.besslerswheel.com/html/conservative_force.html
If I drop a book on the floor I say that its fall has consumed one packet of gravitational energy. If I drop two books on the floor at the same time there will still be only one packet of energy used, but if the two books drop one after the other then two packets of energy have been used. If a very heavy dictionary and small pocket diary fall at the same time only one packet of energy has been used. So the number of packets of energy used depends purely on whether they happened to fall together or separately.
If I drop a bag of billiard balls on the floor, I can calculate how much energy was used by weighing the bag of balls and measuring how far they fell - weight times vertical fall gives us a figure indicating the work done by gravity. I could also weigh the bag and each ball separately and work out how much work was done for each item. If I then added those figures together the resulting total would be the same as for the bag of balls. So it doesn’t matter how far they fell or how heavy they were - all we are interested in knowing is whether they fell together or separately and that is why I call the amount of work done by gravity, a packet of energy consumed.
The reason I use this phrase is to try to explain how one half of a pair of weights can move the other half without coming into conflict with the conservative nature of gravity. Their falls do not happen at the same time and therefore their new positions can be used advantageously to rotate the wheel.!
I realize of course that this phrase is normally used in connection with photons or gravitons but in this instance there is no direct connection with that concept.
JC
