Time and Tide: A Romance of the MoonBall, Robert S. (Robert Stawell)
History
Time and Tide: A Romance of the Moon
Ball, Robert S. (Robert Stawell)
Moon; Satellites; Tides
These illustrations will suffice to show how a rapidly rotating body
may contain energy in virtue of its rotation, just as a cannon-ball
contains energy in virtue of its speed of translation, or as a
clock-weight has energy in virtue of the fact that it has some
distance to fall before it reaches the earth. The rotating body need
not necessarily have the shape of a wheel--it may be globular in form;
nor need the axes of rotation be fixed in bearings, like those of the
fly-wheel; nor of course is there any limit to the dimensions which
the rotating body may assume. Our earth is, in fact, a vast rotating
body 8000 miles in diameter, and turning round upon its axis once
every twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes. Viewed in this way,
the earth is to be regarded as a gigantic fly-wheel containing a
quantity of energy great in correspondence with the earth's mass. The
amount of energy which can be stored by rotation also depends upon the
square of the velocity with which the body turns round; thus if our
earth turned round in half the time which it does at present, that is,
if the day was twelve hours instead of twenty-four hours, the energy
contained in virtue of that rotation would be four times its present
amount.
Reverting now to the earth-moon system, the energy which that system
contains consists essentially of two parts--the moon-energy, whose
composite character I have already explained, and the earth-energy,
which has its origin solely in the rotation of the earth on its axis.
It is necessary to observe that these are essentially distinct--there
is no necessary relation between the speed of the earth's rotation and
the distance of the moon, such as there is between the distance of the
moon and the speed with which it revolves in its orbit.
For completeness, it ought to be added that there is also some energy
due to the moon's rotation on its axis, but this is very small for
two reasons: first, because the moon is small compared with the
earth, and second, because the angular velocity of the moon is also
very small compared with that of the earth. We may therefore dismiss
as insignificant the contributions from this source of energy to the
sum total.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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