History Main / NoConservationOfEnergy

** Well, not exactly - he does suggest that the laser gains energy by burning calories, explaining why Frans collapsed from exhaustion after using it once. Don't know if there's enough energy in a person's body to power a killer laser, but it's not a straight violation.
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* Averted in the ''Young Wizards'' series. Anything (including the god-like PowersThatBe) which operates inside of a universe is bound by that universe's laws, including both the conservation of energy and the laws of thermodynamics. Although 'bound' may be too strong a term.

*** Nope. Law of conservation of baryon number. No process for creating antimatter is more than 50% effective. Given impossibly perfect efficiencies of everything, you'd have a net energy gain of zero.

** This still leaves the problem of gravitational potential energy. If you shrink to a cockroach, have someone take you to the top of a tall building, and demorph again, you've lifted a person to the top of a building using only the energy necessary to lift a cockroach. Also, they never explain where mass comes from when you grow.

*** Magic carpets are also exempt, although this may bebecause they use magic in a different way (in 'Weird Sisters' Magrat's broomstick is shown to lose its capacity to fly if it loses too much magic, and in Equal Rites, Granny's broomstick doesn't work in sunlight, although this is later solved).

* Averted in the ''Wizards'' series. Anything (including the god-like PowersThatBe) which operates inside of a universe is bound by that universe's laws, including both the conservation of energy and the laws of thermodynamics.
** Not to mention that they also can power their spells using temporal energy or the energy of future events such as when Nita was able to block the Lone Power's super-mega-ultra-obliteration attack by burning a year of her life per shot (It should be noted that this did not affect her natural lifespan, it was her chronological lifespan as Kit was furious with her and said something to the effect of "what if you were scheduled to get hit by a truck in three years?!").

* Averted ''hard'' in ''FullmetalAlchemist'', where that extra bit of energy needed to break the laws of physics is always [[MinovskyParticle fully explained]]; In the Anime, the power comes from [[spoiler:''[[LifeEnergy the souls of the dead]]'', more specifically, the dead of ''our'' world; recent advances in medicine, agriculture and ''warfare'' have provided enough deaths for Amestris to develop alchemy.]] Alchemists follow the rules normally, but they can start AbusingTheKardashevScaleForFunAndProfit if they [[spoiler:provide souls from their own world; as in ''commit a few genocides'', like those convenient [[strike:Muslims]] '''[[FictionalCounterpart Ishballans]]''' [[WarOnTerror on the eastern border]]...]]

* {{Code Geass}} has their own version of a nuke known as freia. Instead of releasing a fast amount of energy, the freia creates an expanding energy field ,which after a few seconds implodes and leaves only a void. It has never been explained what happend to all the matter that suddenly disapeared into thin air.

* Sort of handwaved in MercedesLackey's and AndreNorton's ''Elvenblood'' series, where shapeshifting dragons shift excess mass into the "Out", which is implied to be AnotherDimension. Not all dragons are equally skilled, so only the best can assume radically smaller forms such as humans and elves.

* Energy isn't conserved under general relativity. For example, cosmic microwave background radiation was originally much, much higher energy, but as the space it inhabited expanded, so did its wavelength. This energy didn't go anywhere, it's just gone. This could be a problem with our definition of energy, a combination of that and an error in general relativity, or energy might just not be conserved.
** Well, the universe is expanding not by becoming larger per say, but by creating space. What I mean is that there isn't an expanding "frontier" of the universe, but rather distances between objects simply become larger. If so, wouldn't this be a conservation of energy? Then again, I'm not a physicist...yet.
** I am a physicist, but this is not my speciality. But as I see it, space expands too, which would result in ''total'' energy being conserved, but energy ''density'' going down (due to redshift). The other wiki says something similar.

* Averted in Robert Asprin's ''{{MythAdventures}}'' book series: magic is fueled by ley lines criscrossing the worlds, and you have to be tapped into those forces to be an effectively powerful wizard.

If done in a ScienceFiction setting, this is a case of YouFailPhysicsForever. It is generally more acceptable in {{Fantasy}} settings, especially with ArtMajorPhysics, although more thorough authors will try to explain where the power for magic comes from. Some author try to maintain conservation by invoking a law of {{equivalent exchange}}, with varying degrees of success depending on how well it's thought out.

* In the [[HarryPotter]] universe, the answer to the riddle about where Vanished objects go is that they merge with the rest of the universe. This implies that they don't create matter when they Conjure items, either. Wizards just steal matter from their surroundings, reorganize it into the shape they want, then return it when they are done.

** In the Manga, it's slightly different; The Xingese use a "Feng Shui" arrangement to harness ambient environmental energies, but the Amestrans officially use geothermal energy; however, they are actually [[spoiler:doing the same thing as the Anime, though strictly with Amestran souls; they've had ''nine'' Holocaust-level genocides in the past century, and are planning a ''tenth'' that will ''[[ApocalypseHow wipe out all life in Amestris!]]'']]
*** That was the fan assumption, lent credibility due to deliberately misleading wording. They use geothermal energy, Father just disrupts it. This, incidentally, is the scientific explanation for the Xingese "Dragon's Pulse."

** In one instance where Belgarath is teaching Belgarion how to channel Sorcery he instructs Belgarion to gather-up energy from the surrounding environment, then quickly reminds Belgarion NOT to gather energy from Him.

**Dude, it's "anti-space." What makes you think it follows our universe's laws? Or that, once mass is transported there, it still "counts"? You can lift the cockroach easily because it's just a cockroach. That extra mass doesn't enter into the equation until the cockroach demorphs & recalls it.
***That is completely unrelated. The problem is that if you turn a human into a cockroach, you lose some amount of gravitational potential energy in our universe. If you go up a few flights of stairs and turn back into a human, you get more than that amount back. Energy and mass being technically interchangeable, you're taking more out than you put in.