science say'energy can't be created or destroyed',then what happens when we delete a file from the computer?

Answer 1

A file is, in it's simplest form, is just 1's and 0's. When we delete a file, we just overwrite the 1's and 0's with all 0's. There is no energy being lost or gained, except the energy used to demagnetize the hole on the disk that created the 1 or 0.

Answer 2

Hi,

I'm afraid you've confused two totally different issues. The law of the Conservation of Energy is correct as you have paraphrased it. However, deleting a file on your computer is not the same as "destroying energy/mass". In fact, files are not destroyed when they are deleted. Computers are digital, so they understand "1's" and '0s'. When you delete a file, the operating system only marks the spot where that collection of 1's and 0's is located, so that the next time a file is saved, it will be saved in that spot first before any other. The only way to truly be rid of a file, is to physically destroy a hard-drive (as in burn-it, drown-it, and smash it to bits). There are programs available that can even get data off of very badly damaged hard-drives that have been burned or water-logged.

Now, the computer DOES need energy, in the form of electricity to operate (Direct Current to be exact), but there is no other correlation to 'computer data', and the second law of thermodynamics.

Hope this was helpful!

Douglas Digital

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Answer 3

A file in your computer isn't "energy". Information is a computer is stored as ones and zeros-- more specifically as a series of "on" and "off" states in tiny little switches.

If I take a it of information and store it (along with a few billion of its brothers) in a computer, it might look like this:

1 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 1

All of the ones are switches that are "on" and all the zeros are switches that are "off"

to erase that bit of data, all you have to do is turn all the switches off, like so.

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

The only connection to "energy" is that you need energy to turn the switches "on" and that energy doesn't disappear when you turn the switch off. The energy escapes as heat, or is absorbed by the resistance of the circuit and such...

BTW, computers also store information on magnetic disks. When you delete a file on a disk, the information is most likely still there, right where it always was. "Deleting" it only tells the computer to forget where it stored it.

Answer 4

your hard drive is a magnetic medium. The "energy" is north or south magnetism.......

The other interesting thing is that when you erase a file, you don't actually delete the file, but the marker telling the hard drive where the file is located.....The space, while still taken up by the file, can now be overwritten by other data.....

Think about it as a library, instead of getting rid of a book by removing the card from the file AND the book from the shelf, only the card is removed....but when a new book is slated for that space on the shelf, the book is tossed and the new book replaces it and a new card is put in the file.

Answer 5

to delete a file from the computer, the computer has to use energy to rewrite the charges on the disk to remove the way the computer would normally find the file. So no energy is created or destroyed, it just changes form( From electrical to mechanical: to move the head ) or transfers(From the writer to the plate or to the air or back to the electric plant.

Answer 6

Files are not energy. Files are information and information can easily be discarded.


FILES ARE NOT ENERGY. What's so hard to understand about that!

Yes it takes energy (electricity) to operate a computer, but the electricity gets CHANGED into physical motion(spinning and actuating the disk drivesand cooling devices), light (from the monitor), and heat (what part of the computer doesn't emit heat). It takes energy to run the computer, energy when creating files , and when deleting files. Computer files are still not energy. If you need proof of that, just remove a hard drive full of files, and you just try to extract electricity from those files!!!

Not going to happen!!!

Answer 7

If you use windows, when you delete a file and then empty the recycle bin, the file is not really deleted, it is just marked as removed and becomes not accesible.
When a program needs space on the hard drive it overwrites the old file and uses that space.

Answer 8

Hi! Energy's not just in computers. A lot of our resource we rely on natural things that life provided us with, water can gerate electricity as well as the sun. So if computers went out it might take a little while to get things back to normal, but we wouldn't be completely that bad off. Just be alot harder to get entertainments that so many of us enjoy,enternet, new games for gamesystems, etc...

Answer 9

Magnetically stored information is energy, huh? Never thought of it that way, I just thought it was magnetic lines arranged for informative/instructional purposes.Even so the magnetic particles are never destroyed, just re-arranged.

Answer 10

when you are deleting, you are just transmitting!