Coupling Through Emergent Conservation Laws (Part 6)

joint post with Jonathan Lorand, Blake Pollard, and Maru Sarazola

Now let’s think about emergent conservation laws!

When a heavy rock connected to a lighter one by a pulley falls down and pulls up the lighter one, you’re seeing an emergent conservation law:

Here the height of the heavy rock plus the height of light one is a constant. That’s a conservation law! It forces some of the potential energy lost by one rock to be transferred to the other. But it’s not a fundamental conservation law,...