Originally Posted by
caloso
Two things:
1) You are conflating power and energy. They are related but different. Energy measures the work that's delivered. Power measures the rate at which it is delivered.
No, "1000 kilo-joules in an hour" IS power (278 watts in fact), no conflation going on there. There seems to be a blind spot with cyclists, maybe because the conversion of kj - calorie is so close to metabolic efficiency, that they don't think of the efficiency changing under different conditions.
Originally Posted by
caloso
2) He literally asked a simple physics question and you inferred a more complicated question than the one posed. Again, I'm not saying you are wrong; just that the question was asked and answered several times in the first 10 posts,
Not trying to be picky, but he literally asked if it WAS a simple physics question. It's only a simple physics answer if you ignore the variables. To put it bluntly, only kbarch got it close to right, and he also neglected that drive train efficiency is also part of the "simple physics" answer (which invalidates ALL of the first 10 answers).