A molecular pilgrimage…let the journey begin

Almost six months ago in a previous article entitled “PROTONS…THE CREATOR GODS”, I blogged about one of nature’s particles i.e protons and their role in empowering the most amazing race on the planet, the race that determines who is going to born to see the light of day and who will vanish in the bottomless chasm, never to be born again. At that time what I had in mind was to cover the full circle of life and pay my tribute to all those molecular gods out there that are the reason why we are the way we are today, but procrastination held me back.

Today I decided to pick up where I left six months ago and continue this molecular pilgrimage to traverse through this sacred land of nothingness. I don’t know where it is going to take us and how it is going to end, all I can hope is that it be an interesting one.

Along the way, we will call upon various molecular gods, explore their cathedrals, pay homage at their respective shrines, look at how their rituals and prayers are invoked to keep things in motion, to keep this universe alive.

So before we start, let’s make sure we pack the stuff that we might need on the way…

Well, we don’t really know where we are heading, a map is not going to help, but as per the famous Chinese proverb “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. But we need to start somewhere, we need to take the first step, and we need to head in some direction, otherwise, we run the risk of going in circles.

I don’t want to go into another cycle of procrastination again, but I am kind of stuck here, where do I begin, how do I gather the energy to move forward.

It is bloody energy, nothing really happens without it, I can’t lift a finger without it, the sun can’t shine, planets can’t move, galaxies can’t spin, this blog can’t progress without energy.

What use is this body, this planet, this universe without energy?

Now if this energy is so intertwined in everything and nothing really happens without it, so why not follow its trail, maybe it can take us somewhere interesting. So Hurrah !!! Let the journey begin…

By energy I don’t mean some unknown spooky mystical thing that those crystal gazers often invoke, I am talking about the everyday plain vanilla thing that keeps us moving.

So what is energy, some textbook might say that the energy is a measure of the capability of an object or system to do the work and in the next sentence, it might introduce some fancy mumbo jumbo term like thermodynamics to confuse the heck out of everyone.

So you might ask, What is thermodynamics? Well, “thermo” is heat and “dynamics” is kind of motion, so kind of motion of things as they are heated. Under the hoods it is actually a bit more than that, it is the branch of science that deals with the relations between heat and other forms of energy (mechanical, electrical, or chemical energy) and the interrelationships among various forms.

Scientists say energy is everywhere, everything in this universe is very very energetic, every atom in the universe has a lot of energy. Many have spent their lives studying and exploring nature of energy, one famous one even came up with a fancy equation (E = mc2) to describe it in mathematical terms.

What that equation is saying is that energy in everything is its mass times the speed of light squared. Well, the speed of light is a really big number, almost 300 million miles per second and squaring that number yields an even bigger number.

That means there is a lot of energy packed in things.

With that much energy in everything, why are people worried about running out of energy ?

In order for us to follow the energy trail, we need to understand some basic laws that it follows. There are basically three laws and these are commonly referred to as the laws of thermodynamics…

The first law, states that in an isolated system energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

The second law states that the entropy of any isolated system always increases.

The third law states that the entropy of a system approaches a constant value as the temperature approaches absolute zero.

An isolated system is a system that is enclosed in a boundary and no exchange of matter or energy takes place outside that boundary. Taking this definition into account we can say that our planet is not a closed system, but as far as we know we know our universe is.

So if energy can neither be created nor be destroyed, how come we don’t have an infinite energy supply, why are we worried about running out of energy, running out of fossil fuels. This is where entropy comes in the picture.

You might ask, what the heck is entropy?

Entropy is a measure of order in a system, number of states in the system, number of ways in which it can be arranged. When a system is in order it can only be arranged in certain ways, hence its entropy is low, when it is in disorder, it can be arranged in a large number of ways so its entropy is high. In simple terms when things are chunky they are ordered, the entropy is low and when things are more granular entropy is high. In our Universe, The Law of Entropy suggests that as time passes, entropy increases and as the entropy increases the system becomes less orderly and as the system becomes less orderly, energy become spread among little chunks and as a result less and less energy becomes available for use.

The third law has not only humanity’s fate sealed in it has the fate of our universe written all over it, it states that one day we will reach a state when everything is so disorganised (maximum entropy) that no energy will be left to do any useful work. This is the time when this universe will become a cold and barren place.

So coming back to the laws, the question is, what can we do with these laws?

Just a point of caution before we delve too much into the laws. One thing we need to acknowledge is that no laws are absolute laws, no laws are written on stone.

The laws are simply ways of looking at things, one might ask, why do I need laws to think about things, I am a free thinker, I can think the way I want to, my thinking is not governed by any laws.

Well’ that is true, but you need to acknowledge that thinking is cumulative in nature, you need some ground, even if you are building your castle’s in the air. You need something stable to build upon, you need something to start with, it is very hard to think about things that you have not thought before.

Thinking is like building a crystal, you need a seed to start building one and you need to lot of patience to watch it grow. If you don’t know what crystals are and how they grow, here is a quick video.

As Daniel Dennet quoted, Bo Dahlbom in his book “Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking”

“You can’t do much carpentry with your bare hands and you can’t do much thinking with your bare brain.”

We need these laws to do the thinking, laws are our seed crystals, we can build our world around them, laws are our thinking tools, we can come up with our own tools or use the ones built by others, either way, we need to make sure they are trustworthy enough to build a solid foundation.

So now we have the tools, let’s start building our thinking, lets’ explore this energy conundrum, the invisible aura that we turn a blind eye to.

Before we dig a bit deeper, we need to know where we are, where do these laws fit in the big scheme of things, what part of reality they interface with.

At the very bottom, we have quantum laws that shield us from the reality, the laws of thermodynamic provide a second layer of abstraction, they abstract the behaviour of populations of microscopic atoms and molecules and let us interface with how they behave and interact with each other. It is this very interaction that manifests into various phenomena like temperature, pressure, entropy and various energy states and behaviour of matter.

These laws are not just bland conclusions about nature of things, they have a deep philosophical significance as well.

The first law is really saying that there is no magic energy out there, you can’t create energy out of nothing. The second law is saying that things are constantly moving from order to disorder and you and me can’t do much about it, it is irreversible, and the third law clearly spells the doomsday scenario, when we will end up in a perfect disorderly state, at that time there will be no more energy left to do any work so everything will come to a screeching halt, that will be the death of this universe as we know today.

Now equipped with all these laws lets follow the energy trail, so where does this energy come from, the easy answer is that universe was born with the energy, according to big bang theory all the energy and matter were created ay the time of origin, it all started with a bang. The bing bang is something that is believed to happened billions (13.8 billion) of years ago, we don’t really know what was it like at that time, people say space and time were also born with the universe. But as far as we are concerned all the energy encountered by our planet is derived from the energy contained within and released by the sun.

The sun is made up a ridiculous amount of matter, perhaps a billion billion billion tonnes. A lot of matter means a lot of gravitational force that squeezes the star inwards. As a result, it crushes millions of tonnes (120 million) of hydrogen every minute. What causes this big crush is a form of energy, we will visit that one day, bt lets focus on easy things first. As hydrogen atoms are crushed and used into helium a small amount of energy is liberated, it is this very energy that knocks on our door every morning.

Energy from the sun travels in tiny packets, those packets are called photons. These photons travel very very fast, in fact, they travel at the speed of light, there are only a few things that can travel at the speed of light, photons being one of them. A while back there were reports that neutrinos have broken the speed limit but those claims were busted very soon, so nothing is known to travel faster than the speed of light at this stage. There are few interesting things about the speed of light, that I would like to explore but I will wait for the first set of photons to arrive in the morning to knock on my door.

Originally published at scriptgrandeur.wordpress.com on August 20, 2016.