Re: Does a battery or a clock lose mass...

rja.carnegie@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:

And if it's a clock spring, metal under tension, energy stored by
pushing metal atoms into a less "comfortable" configuration... what
exactly has got heavier?

The spring. The sum total of the atoms in the spring now have a mass sligthly higher than the same number of atoms would have individually.

Similarily, if you let one Oxygen atom react with two Hydrogen-atoms and produce a single watermolecule, then the watermolecule will end up having sligthly lower mass than 2*H-mass plus 1*O-mass, the difference being precisely equal to the energy released in the reaction.


Eivind Kjørstad
.

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