Conservation

Conservation is the act of preserving, guarding or protecting; wise use.

Conservation may refer to:

Main usage:

Other usage:

Subtopics

Conservation of biodiversity, environment, and natural resources

Conservation (psychology)

Conservation refers to a logical thinking ability which, according to the psychologist Jean Piaget, is not present in children during the preoperational stage of their development at ages 2–7, but develops in the concrete operational stage at ages 7–11. Conservation refers to the ability to determine that a certain quantity will remain the same despite adjustment of the container, shape, or apparent size.

Tasks

Conservation tasks test a child’s ability to see that some properties are conserved or invariant after an object undergoes physical transformation. The following tasks also explain the different types of conservation. Piaget proposed that children's inability to conserve is due to weakness in the way children think during the preoperational stage (ages 4–5). This stage of cognitive development is characterized by children focusing on a single, salient dimension of height or length, while ignoring other important dimensions about a situation. Children during this stage also tend to focus on the static characteristics of objects, instead of focusing on when objects undergo changes, which is a critical element of the following tasks.

Conservation law

In physics, a conservation law states that a particular measurable property of an isolated physical system does not change as the system evolves over time. Exact conservation laws include conservation of energy, conservation of linear momentum, conservation of angular momentum, and conservation of electric charge. There are also many approximate conservation laws, which apply to such quantities as mass, parity, lepton number, baryon number, strangeness, hypercharge, etc. These quantities are conserved in certain classes of physics processes, but not in all.

A local conservation law is usually expressed mathematically as a continuity equation, a partial differential equation which gives a relation between the amount of the quantity and the "transport" of that quantity. It states that the amount of the conserved quantity at a point or within a volume can only change by the amount of the quantity which flows in or out of the volume.

From Noether's theorem, each conservation law is associated with a symmetry in the underlying physics.