Complex Numbers

Life, The Universe, and Everything

If you can write about something, is it really intangible?

PROMPT November 28^th

Hopefully a little change of pace tonight. Write about something intangible: faith, magic, energy, power, or creativity.
Just choose one topic, and write about it.

Well, sure, I suppose it's still intangible if you can write about it. Consider a hole, for example. A hole is defined by its surroundings. You can't meaningfully point at a spot in mid-air and go, "That's a hole." It's a thing, but it's not a thing, at the same time. Thinking about it too hard makes your head hurt.

I guess, though, I'm limited to one of those five topics in the prompt, which is too bad, because I've been mulling over a rant about the abstract concept known as "freedom." I guess that one can wait.

So let's talk about energy.

As far as I can tell, energy has two distinct, separate definitions:

1) The capacity to do work;
2) The capacity to do work.

The first definition is physical. That is, it comes from physics. "Work," in this context, is force exerted over some distance. (Energy is also equivalent to mass, per Einstein's well-known formula). For example, the force required to move your car over a flat surface for, say, a mile, can be computed, and that force is (usually) supplied by energy produced by the car's engine, be it internal combustion or electric. Unless said engine isn't working, in which case it's supplied by your muscles and cuss words.

This kind of energy has several modes, such as: kinetic, potential, thermal, chemical, nuclear, etc. The important thing to know about energy is that it requires a gradient in order to perform the work. Solar energy works because the Earth's surface is cooler than that of the sun. Well, usually; may not apply in Phoenix in July.

Even though it can be measured and quantified, it's still intangible. A hydroelectric dam doesn't only have water, fish, and dead mobsters behind it; it also stores potential energy, though it's not like you can see or touch such energy. When the water passes through a turbine, it does work on the turbine, which converts (some of) that potential energy, by means of kinetic energy, into electrical energy.

The second definition is physical.

In this case, by "physical," I mean related to your body. Isn't English wonderful? And "work," in this case, is what one commonly gets paid to do (or receive some other form of compensation for), such as digging a ditch, writing an essay, or fixing the turbine in a hydroelectric plant.

At times, you may get the feeling of having low energy, and at these times, you just wanna lie in bed and not do any work. In reality, your body continues to chug along, using its (mostly) chemical energy (first definition) to do fun things like keep your organs functioning. When that process stops, it's called "death," and at times of low energy that can look pretty good -- fortunately, though, at those same times, we lack the energy to stop our energy.

Confusingly, you also don't want to play at such times -- "play" being the vernacular opposite of "work." This unfortunately does not have a corresponding definition in physics.

There's an old, really bad joke, which was featured (spoiler alert) in Ghostbusters:Afterlife: "Why should you never trust atoms? Because they make up everything."

Now, I've never let the facts get in the way of a good joke -- or a bad one (especially a bad one). But as the joke was told by a certified nerd, I winced. Not because the joke was so bad (it was) or because it is so old (it is), but because a nerd should know better.

Atoms don't make up everything.

The sun, for example, doesn't have many atoms in it. It's so hot that the electrons are stripped from the nuclei, and what you have is a bunch of free-floating protons/neutrons and electrons. And an "atom" is defined as nucleus plus electrons. Physicists call this phase of matter a "plasma." As the Sun contains the vast majority of the mass in the Solar System (according to Wiki, 99.86%  ), atoms don't make up everything.

Also, dark matter isn't atoms (as far as we know), and it makes up something like 85% of the matter in the universe.

But okay, here on Earth, the vast majority of matter is composed of atoms. (If it seems like I'm using "matter" and "mass" interchangeably, it's because I am, because I can.) Still, going back to that equation I mentioned earlier, all of those (roughly) 1.3*10⁵⁰ atoms can, in theory, be converted to an unimaginably large amount of energy.

Doing so, however, would ruin your day. Hell, they'd probably see the explosion in the Andromeda Galaxy oh, two and a half million years or so from now.

The point being that atoms don't make up everything -- but energy does.

So much for being intangible, I guess.