“Work is Worship” goes the old and wise saying, and it is always necessary to work hard to succeed in any particular venture or life in general. But do you really understand what the term “work” means from the scientific perspective?
Introduction
It does not require much explanation especially to students as to how important is the concept of work in life. If you are not found working hard enough, you might end up being labeled as lazy or might not get the proper grades in your class. But did you know that even if you were a book work and did not sleep whole night burning the oil-lamp (or tube-light in the modern era), scientifically you may not have worked hard enough. “That’s the limit”, you might say but let me explain below why is it so.
What is Work?
To put it in the simplest of words, work is the phenomenon of transfer of energy. You can intuitively imagine that energy can be transferred both ways, either “to” a body or “by” a body.
But how does this energy transfer take place?
Well there are different ways in which energy can be transferred from one body to another but we will be talking about the mechanical energy transfer only. There can be other modes of energy transfer as well such as by radiation, thermal convection and so forth but these do not fall under the purview of mechanical work.
So the energy transfer being talked about here takes place through the application of a force which actually makes the object move from its original position into a different position.
Let us say that if a force “F” is applied to a body, and it moves through a distance “s” mathematically the work done “W” on the body is given by the equation
W = F * s
Units of Work
Work is measured in units of Joules (in SI units) while force and distance are measured in units of Newton and meters respectively. Hence it can be seen using these units and the above equation that one joule of work is performed when a force of one Newton moves an object by one meter from its initial position.
Work is a scalar quantity i.e. without a direction while force and distance are both vector quantities i.e. they need a direction as well for their full description apart from magnitude.
Is this all?
The above equation seems pretty simple and you might think that you have learnt everything regarding work but it’s just the beginning folks (work never ends even in the worldly sense). The above equation is the basic equation which is applicable to a simple situation where the direction of application of force is exactly the same as the direction in which the body moves upon application of that force.
In cases where it is not so, the component of force which is line with the direction of motion accounts for the work done on the body. This component of force can be calculated using the rules of trigonometry. I will explain this concept in detail later on as it is not proper to load one article with all the details and make it complex.
Lastly you must be able to answer the question which I asked in the intro section as to why would not any work be done if you studied whole night in your study room!!