Energy - Again!

Last night over an ice-cream cone some topic came up, and I found myself saying, again, “Energy!”.

It’s all about energy.

This morning’s Toronto Star has an article about a large fire that broke out last week.

"How could one person alone do this much damage?" a local resident asks.

How simple can this get?

A match contains enough potential energy in a readily-released form (chemicals in the match-head) to ignite the wooden match-stick.

That wooden match-stick contains enough potential energy to ignite a sheet of newspaper. Or a pint of gasoline. Or a trail of gasoline, and so on, until within minutes 60 townhouses are in flames, causing, we are told, $11,000,000 dollars of damage.

When a toddler on a tri-cycle loses control at the top of a shallow sloping footpath, the potential energy implicit in the toddler’s height above the lowest part of the hill is converted to kinetic energy in the form of ever-increasing motion (with consequent tumble, scrapes, tears etc.)

When we fall off a ladder or table, the potential energy implicit in our height above the ground is converted to kinetic energy (in the traditional ½ m v ^2 formula), and it hurts.

My understanding of matter is that we are all composed of molecules, and they of “atoms”, and they of particles with names like quarks, bosons, pions and so on, and that they in turn are nothing else but mathematical equations.

Energy.

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