Wednesday, August 9, 12023 Human Era (HE)
- Introduction and Warnings
- Background Basics
- Back on Track: Let’s get to…
- Energy
Introduction and Warnings
I have always enjoyed learning anatomy more than physiology. But after writing several posts on anatomy and biomechanics specific to stand up paddleboard (SUP) and refreshing my anatomical knowledge, I thought it would be a fun exercise to refresh on some energy metabolism physiology. And as with many things for this blog, a recent conversation with a client solidified my motivation. I found myself floundering through an explanation of metabolic pathways in the context of high-intensity training. Time for a refresher. Though, to be fair, the conversation was venturing into the realm of the esoteric, and I warned them of such.
So, as a word of warning pour vous, my interest and expertise are in anatomy as a licensed physical therapist and manual osteopathic practitioner. My physiology knowledge is good, but I am less confident in my knowledge base and hardly an expert on this topic. Physiology just never interested me as much as anatomy. While reviewing for this post, I was reminded why. Physiology is hard! You need to remember a bunch of abstract, complex chemical names as well as how they interact. While the general idea of why and how is easier to understand/remember, the specifics at the molecular/substrate level are complex and challenging. Perhaps if my organic chemistry knowledge was better, the substrate specifics would make more sense. I think of my mind as being more mechanistic, but apparently, that is at the macro-level, not the micro-level of the molecular. Without knowing the how or why of the chemicals, I find it hard to be excited about learning what they are doing. A discoid deterrent to my educational discipline. Ultimately, I put less effort into my physiology studies, hence the circular nature of my educational dilemma. All this is to say, take the following with a grain of salt, and be forewarned, that this will likely go into the abstruse weeds of exercise physiology.
Words of Warning
My plan is to (eventually) cover an overview of metabolism through a series of posts and present the various metabolic pathways, and then get into practical implications of how to train the various energy systems/pathways specific to SUP. But first, this post will make a wide sweeping overview of energy and its implications to life.
One other word of warning is that if you are truly just interested in the energetics of SUP, feel free to skip over my segue on sex-typing for this installation.
Background Basics
If you would like to get an animated educational version of the background basics, check out the video below from Kurzgesagt on “Why Are You Alive – Life, Energy & ATP.” For another take on what life is, check out this Big Think video with Paul Nurse, “The 5 core principles of life,” that promotes his book “What is Life?” As far as we can tell, energy, or fluctuations in fields, are the basis of our Universe and essential to life as we know it. What then is energy?
But before we tackle energy, I can’t help but take a…
Semantical Segue (skip if you’re sensitive on chauvinistic sex stereotypes)
This next section has nothing to do with paddleboarding or energy metabolism, except for the parallel of ambiguous annotation. Feel free to skip ahead to the sections that are more pertinent to the metabolics of SUP if that is what you are searching for.
What is perhaps perplexing to some yet evident to others is that we do not have a consensus definition of life. While most of us have an intuition about what is alive or not, coming up with a scientific definition that reaches universal consensus has proved to be impossible to date. How something so fundamental to our existence and pervasive in our routine experience can go ill-defined seems counterintuitive at face value. A deeper inspection reveals that, like many fundamental aspects of our natural world, defining and categorising them is less an exercise in describing reality and more one of placating humanity. For an attempt at an explanation check out the third part of the “Origins” series from the Vox podcast Unexplainable titled “Origins: The meaning of ‘Life’ ” The ‘cast covers how coming to a consensus on what constitutes life has been a contentious course. The first two episodes are also well worth a listen, as they attempt to explain, “How did Earth get its water?,” and “The first living thing.”
Defining Identities
Listening to the lack of a definition of what “life” is reminded me of a YouTube advertisement I recently saw. My viewing experience was interrupted by an advertisement for Matt Walsh‘s ‘documentary’ “What is a Woman?” (here is the official trailer). The advert left me wondering what in my search history tweaked the algorithm towards wondering about womanhood? Or was the advert just a generic blanket splattering of YouTube viewership by well-funded non-progressive propagandists? Upon reflection, I suspect the video made my algorithm feed after recent conversations and ensuing internet searches, subsequent to benign bantering between boy friends, meandering more toward malignant misunderstandings on gender ideology.
Pronouns and the Duck Test
I perceive myself to be relatively progressive in my views regarding gender identity. My caveat/confession is that I am not wholeheartedly pro-pronoun. I am happy to address people by whatever title they wish. My qualms are not with the pronouns or associated identities but are rather tributary and two-fold. First, I don’t want to have to guess someone’s selected identity. Especially if it is ambiguous or contrary to current cultural conventions. This is particularly the case if there is the threat of rebuke or chastisement in the context of error or misidentification. Maybe I am overly sensitive in believing in a rebuke, but I do feel that there is social pressure, or at least tension, to correctly identify someone who is gender fluid. Call that my gender-normative guilt or something of the ilk. I am not a mind-reader and don’t believe these are circumstances that warrant reprimand for making an educated guess.
I generally subscribe to the duck test. “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.” And as visual beings, I think most of us do a form of the duck test for many things. As much as we’ve been admonished not to judge a book by its cover, we all do. Hopefully, you will open the cover to read the book, or at minimum, not pass judgement on the cover alone. For the non-experts in waterfowl-ology amongst us, I mean who hasn’t mistaken a coot, grebe, or loon for a majestic mallard, there needs to be some common courtesy or leeway within the first-time pronoun assignment for failures to faultlessly fowl find. As I said, I will address you by whatever you like, with the caveat that I may get it wrong a few times initially. But no more than I may call a Kirsten a Kristen or a Bob Rob.
Second, I am not a fan of the moving toward mandatory pronoun announcement. If you feel the need to add them to your email signature or announce them at a meeting, go for it. Again, you do you. But to me, it feels like the bar has moved toward it being closer to a requirement than something some of us feel is progressing us closer to a just society. I realize that maybe this is just my hetero-cis-gender privilege at play. I don’t have to deal with a steady stream of societal mislabelling of my sex. No mistaking this duck for a hen. But to me, the near-mandatory sign-offs feel more like a sort of woke-culture pseudo-subliminal form of virtue signalling, rather than an authentic attempt to promote inclusivity (for the record I am not bashing wokeness, at least in its original form, the more modern virtue signalling version is a whole other vociferation).
Consider the folks who are struggling with the discord between their gender and sex that are now perhaps forced to make a decision/distinction publicly that they haven’t quite come to terms with. I am a duck in a duck’s body, but if I was trapped in a hen’s body, I might see the sign-off thing differently. It seems the coercive requirement is counter-productive, in that it likely alienates the very people it is trying to include. Again, they are free to choose, just as I am, to play the game or not. But it is harder to play and be the voice of discord or difference if you are the more vulnerable player in the game. Hence, my view is to let anyone who feels strongly about their identity and pronouns to pronounce them. And those that don’t won’t. As long as we accept and respect those wanting to express their preference, it works in my mind. But I’m willing to listen to any viewpoints listing what I’m missing.
Big C. Little c. How do you see?
So, with that caveat aside, I’m open to gender ideology. I was made aware of the distinction between sex and gender by my loving activist roommates at university. The former referring to the reproductive roles or physical characteristics pertaining to the chromosomes and genitals of a species and the latter is the social and cultural roles, behaviours, and expressions typical of men, women, boys, and girls. We generally tend to think of these as binary categories, but apart from a strict biological definition of sex, I don’t think they are. That is where the conversation with a Conservative conservative (big “C” and little “c”) companion of mine became contentious.
Past and Present Perversions
The conversation started after he shared a link to an article citing a Gallup poll, noting the recent uptick in Americans self-identifying as other than heterosexual. Particularly concerning (to him) was that around 20% of Gen Z adults identify as LGBT. I wasn’t that surprised by the number. It seemed like a reasonable and probable estimate, albeit high. In high school, one of my basketball coaches quoted a statistic that 10% of the population is gay. The underlying suggestion was that someone on our 12-player roster likely was gay (obviously, the statistics are not that simple, but we got his point). Thus, I was familiar with the 10% estimate previously and recently came across credible reports that the 10% of the population is gay statistic is accurate. If you add a few more letters beyond “G” to the LGBTQ2 acronym, you’re bound to bring up the digits. Couple that with a more tolerant society to be “sexually out” and 20% in the up-and-coming generation doesn’t seem too wild to me. Sprinkle on a healthy margin of error, and the number is totally plausible.
We were both in agreement that there is likely a bit of an overinflation of that number in that it is trendy to be sexually deviant at the moment. Though we were in disagreement about why that was the case. In my mind, a bigger factor is that it is simply ‘hip and trendy’ to be different. In his mind, the uptick was due to too liberal sexual education and the indoctrination of impressionable youth. I will concede an aspect of impressionability is likely at play, to his point. But to me, it is more in the context of general acceptance, giving rise to a trend. Just like we are back to rolling jean cuffs in circa 12020 HE as if we just time warped back to the 11980-90s with tight rolls, trends tend to cycle. I am curious about what the long-term trend in sexual orientation will be. A simple survey of history reveals that ideals of what constitutes normal/acceptable ‘sexual orientation’ have changed over the ages. History cycles. It is similar but never the same. The Earth revolves around the Sun, but each rotation is a slightly different iteration from the previous. Think of Ancient Greece and the Renaissance. The Renaissance was ultimately an attempt to return to the ideals of Ancient Greece, two millenia later. It is only most recently, that we have had so much contention surrounding sexual orientation (hello monotheistic Abrahamic religions…I am waving at you). Though, I am well aware that this is not an apples-to-apples comparison as the ideologies of sexuality have shifted over time. There wasn’t the same concept of homosexuality or transsexualism in the past as these are modern doctrines, distinct for what they stand for today.
The conversation later ventured into gender identity politics. As far as I could tell, his view here was that society at large is making a mistake regarding how we deal with gender dysphoria. I got the impression that his belief is that many (my emphasis, not his) children are undergoing hormone therapy and surgery to deal with their gender dysphoria, resulting in irreparable harm. The underlying assumption is that the droves of adolescents undertaking these procedures ultimately come to regret them at a later date. His stance was emboldened by the breaking news that Sweden had reversed its gender treatment protocols, the so-called “Dutch Protocol,” which introduced early adolescent interventions to delay puberty. I was doubtful of the claim that there are droves of patients under these circumstances. Granted, there must be few cases where a patient would come to regret their decision, but I would guess those cases to be few and far between. To begin with, how many people are gender dysphoric, i.e., to the point that they would be willing to entertain such extreme interventions. Even if the 20% transgender statistic from above is correct, that doesn’t mean that all those individuals are experiencing gender dysphoria. Many of them likely see their transgenderness as a positive, especially if this is the burgeoning trend we both basically believe it to be. Imagine if society wasn’t prejudiced toward sexual perversions, I would bet the number of individuals truly experiencing gender dysphoria would diminish.
Furthermore, in Canada, I know that the standard to treat gender dysphoria in adolescents and youths is high, requiring consultation with medical and psychological professionals before access to hormonal or surgical treatment is granted. It is not like some teenager decides they don’t feel right in their body, and then the next day, they’re taking drugs to prevent the development of secondary sex characteristics. There are checks and balances in place to make sure there is a consistent and documented trend of gender dysphoria before any extreme measures are taken. I can only assume that is best practice in other jurisdictions, too. Though perhaps not as much in the wild west of US privatised medical care delivery, where the incentive to treat or mistreat is less discreet. Interestingly, I suspect much of the misguided media on transgender medicine emerges from ministerial morality from our non-northerly neighbour. If it is the case that medical interventions are being prescribed without due diligence, then I do think we have a problem. But I’m skeptical, that is the case, particularly in Canada.
De Dutch Protocol
In fairness to my friend, I did look up some evidence after the fact and came across this paper, “The Dutch Protocol for Juvenile Transsexuals: Origins and Evidence“, which scrutinizes the practices of early intervention in juvenile transsexuals. Interestingly, the article explains the change in stance by Sweden results from evidence suggesting no better outcomes from early interventions. Such interventions are not without risk, as I think should be made clear to any individual seeking a drastic intervention for dysphoria. Accurate information is essential for informed decisions in the context of patient autonomy. But I do think it is worth asking the ethical question should we be intervening? Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. It is worth opening the conversation around essential versus elective healthcare in the treatment of gender dysphoria. I personally am not convinced that hormonal and surgical interventions constitute essential healthcare. That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t do it. We perform all types of non-essential healthcare practices [e.g., cosmetic surgery, some forms of exercise (e.g., sports conditioning, bodybuilding), and dieting] that people aren’t up in arms about. While the term “intersex” first appears in the 11700s HE, biologically, it is not a new phenomenon. History is full of records of intersexed people from various cultures. What is different is our modern scientific understanding (and possible cultural lack of one) and (some of) our collective attitudes toward this group.
How to approach gender ideology and conditions like gender dysphoria raises scientific, ethical, and cultural questions. Science should be objective. What do the evidence and data say? But that scientific question is only answerable if you have taken the time to ask the correct questions and collect the data. The ethical and cultural questions are far more subjective and contentious. What do we collectively value? Do we want a society that is inclusive of the full spectrum of (human) biology? Or one that denies a certain segment of the population, respect, and justice? We have travelled down that path in the past with many dark periods throughout our history, and I don’t think it is a road we ought to travel again.
Biological Bickering
Further to the dialogue on biological definitions pertaining to life is where sex fits in. The categorical classification definition is not the action. Biologically speaking, we have what at face value seems to be a simple definition of what female (think woman for hominids) is. It is the sex with the big gametes, that is sex cells. In humans, that is who we’ve conventionally called “women.” Women, or better stated in the biological context, females, typically have ovaries capable of producing oocytes. Though, perhaps a better definition should be the organism that passes on mitochondria to the offspring as the female form, since most of life passes on mitochondria maternally (one more ripple in Walsh’s illusion of a clear vision of what a women is).
Things also get weird in the wild world of the intersexed. While uncommon (kind of), we know and have known for some time that a subset of the population is intersexed. Meaning their chromosomal, gonadal, or genital characteristics do not fit the male/female binary. Where that line becomes slightly more controversial is who to include in that category and, therefore, what the true estimates of the population are. One estimate of 1.7% is in line with the proportion of phenotypic redheads in the population. If true, hardly uncommon, as many of us are able to call to mind a redhead that we either know or know of. However, a counter estimate that is two orders of magnitude lower, at 0.018%, is also reported. Semantics matter, as the difference is in the definition of intersexed. But it raises the question of what the accurate account is? In any case, we can conclude that in a strictly biological sense, intersexed humans exist. We just don’t really know how many. Moreover, collectively and individually, what do we do with that knowledge?
Back to Walsh’s Women
Thus, it may be the source of the end product of intercourse that the movie endorsed was this past discourse. Of course, it could also just have been a force from the DailyWire+ media source.
Keep it simple, stupid.
I will admit that the hook on the advertisement for the movie was captivating. Playing (praying or even preying?) on your emotional brain, the advert barrages brief clips of on-the-spot interviews where people within the gender fluidity community claiming to be women (contrary to customary conservative views) are unable to define what a woman is. The implicit argument is that their inability to define what a woman is means they can’t possibly be a woman. The feeblemindedness of such a facile argument is simultaneously its beauty. An unquestioning mind easily accepts that an inability to define what we think of as a simple idea, womanhood, is the same as not being able to embody the abstraction of what is womanhood. My guess is that most people put on the spot would be hard-pressed to define almost anything, let alone an idea as broad as what it means to be a woman. So that hardly is an argument against being a woman. I would be hard-pressed to give a coherent definition of “life” on the spot, but that doesn’t mean I am dead. The logic here is stupefying. While we all feel that we have an idea of what a woman is, or what female means, the fact that biologists are still debating the definition, or at least the inclusion criteria, signals that our simple notions do not suffice.
As with the ‘life’ example, we all have a gut instinct as to what constitutes being alive. Bird, yes. Rock, no. Tree, yes. Dirt, no. Where it starts to get murky is at the edges of the definition. Wood, hmm. Maybe the wood is dying if freshly cut? Dead if it is a coffee table. What about crystals? They are able to grow, reach equilibrium, and respond to stimuli. Artificial intelligence? Viruses? Depending on your working definition of life, the lines begin to blur. Do you use the standard biological seven criteria system (homeostasis (sounds sort of like equilibrium as per above), organisation, metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, and reproduction)? Perhaps another definition from physics, NASA, or the Gaia Hypothesis? The same holds true for the definition of sex. Broadly speaking, there are two sex-determination systems, genotypic (i.e., chromosomal) and environmental. Though in the Tree of Life, a third category of hermaphrodites exists as the norm but is rare. In humans, the so-called “true hermaphroditism” is also a rare condition but exists. Biology is a strange and diverse world with wide variations of sexual reproduction strategies such as the Amazon Molly fish. The point is it is complicated and too simplistic to think that we have all the answers.
Short Tort to Contort
When Matt Walsh gives the simple and concise definition of a woman as “an adult human female,” the goal is to make the audience feel that the solution is simple. While that is an elegantly simple response, and at face value true, it also opens more questions than it answers. Each term within his definition is a can of worms on its own.
Take adult. I live in Canada, where the federal age of majority is different (in some cases) from the provincial age of majority, which is different from province to province. So, the definition of an adult is ill-defined.
What about “human?” Here again, the definition is blurry. To elucidate the point, when I grew up Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) were seen as a separate species from modern humans (Homo sapiens). However, genetic evidence now points to the fact that humans today whose ancestors lived outside of Africa have approximately 2% Neanderthal deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and interbred with Neanderthals making them, by common definition, the same species. Another consideration would be the idea that there is no first human since evolutionarily speaking the changes are spectral. Lastly, consider a loose take on the three-fifths compromise. Strictly speaking, the clause dealt with personhood status with respect to voting, but a looser less incorrect interpretation could be to conceive the clause to curtail civic choice as a crack at categorizing a class of people outside of civilization and thus, subhuman. Extending the argument of universal suffrage as a sign of legal human status (very loose argument, I know, but it is considered a universal human right in our anthropocentric mythos) and who constitutes a human based on their political voice has a dire history. And soon enough, we may be crossing another precipice of what constitutes human as Artificial Intelligence continues to progress and raises the potential for things like cyborgs. Conclusion. While “human” is a pretty set term presently, on an evolutionary time scale it hasn’t been consistent (the proverbial chicken and the egg paradox) and will not be in the future, whether that is natural or artificial evolution. Furthermore, if you believe my argument around the legal/enfranchisement status of humans, then who is human is presently less clear-cut.
Lastly, we come to females, and as we see biologically speaking, we have a definition for that. But things get blurry when it is less clear what size gametes a “human” has, and what happens if they have both. Do you choose the functioning fertile set? If so, what does that say about the sex status of anyone who is infertile or has fertility issues?
While Walsh’s witty words on what is a woman seem simple at a glance, a deeper dive displays that his diction is dubious.
Mind Your Body Busybody
Ultimately, in the context of my collegial conversation, my final question was, “Why do you care?” Like how does someone else’s sexual orientation affect you? It doesn’t, really. The only potential problem I see is an unwanted sexual advance. In that case, sexual orientation or gender identity doesn’t matter. It is an unwanted advance, and your response should be the same whether you are heterosexual or homosexual and someone of the same or opposite sex makes an advance. My friend’s response to “Why do you care” was that he is a father and that the indoctrination of his children made it his issue. I disagree, and in my mind, if that is your stance, you have a whole bunch of shit that you are going to need to fight because we are all indoctrinated in something. The big bad “c” word. Culture, ya Aussie vagina. Jokes aside, there are plenty of things that your children will encounter that you may not agree with (e.g., coarse language, late bedtimes, high-fructose corn syrup, religion, non-religion, contact sports, alcohol, drugs, etc.). It is up to you as a parent and family to inform and educate your child about how to interact with those situations and circumstances. If you truly think transsexualism or gender fluidity is wrong, then go ahead and teach your children that. You do you. But at least have the decency to teach your children in the process to respect others and practice the golden rule, and maybe in the process let them know that not everyone or everything in life is going to conform to what they want to be the norm.
How You See the World
I believe my friend’s issue really was that he is uncomfortable with the change and acceptance of a revival of history that does not conform to his recently informed Abrahamically influenced cultural view. The irony of which is that he is a self-proclaimed atheist. It is always hard to know why we believe what we do. Theories like the “primal world belief” model suggest that we experience our reality through lenses primed to view the world as fundamentally good or bad. With subdivisions along continuums of seeing the world as safe versus dangerous, enticing versus dull, and alive versus mechanistic. Regardless of the explanatory theory behind our beliefs, I am a firm proponent of epistemic responsibility, which can be cultivated via epistemic virtues.
Today, many of us do not openly identify as pagans or subscribers of Abrahamic faiths. Yet we are surrounded by unseen artifacts of these histories. Our Gregorian calendar, the fact most of us believe it is the year 2023 CE/AD, the days of the week, that we celebrate/observe holidays of pagan origin (e.g., Easter, Halloween, and Christmas), have cake on our birthdays, bless people when they cough, believe in “disasters“, and practice social welfare, are a few examples that reveal how intertwined our present is with our pagan and pious past. We are all young fish in the water, unaware that we are swimming.
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
Source: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/this-is-water
Speak of the Devil
I contemplated deleting this segue of sex and stereotypes after writing it. It is a completely off-topic tangential rant. But, after writing it, a few more instances relating to gender ideology came up in my day-to-day. Conversations, a colleague and friend sharing the video below, and most recently, a gender reveal party at the beach. The gender reveal party specifically reinforced that part of the problem is that our colloquial language conflates gender and sex. It should be a “sex reveal party,” as all the parents know at that point in the pregnancy process is the genetic sex of the child and possibly the sonographic sex-part shapes. The fact that it is called a “gender reveal party” reflects our wider misunderstanding of the terminology and only perpetuates the problem. The video by Sabine Hossenfelder sealed the deal for me to keep my dialogue in the post. It could not have been better timed. It seems to be a topic that is trending, and she elegantly explains the misunderstandings and misrepresentations.
But I have digressed….where were we…oh right…energy.
Back on Track: Let’s get to…
About 13.5 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang. The story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics.
Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens : a Brief History of Humankind. New York: Harper Perennial, 2015.
About 300,000 years after their appearance, matter and energy started to coalesce into complex structures, called atoms, which then combined into molecules. The story of atoms, molecules and their interactions is called chemistry.
About 3.8 billion years ago, on a planet called Earth, certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms. The story of organisms is called biology.
About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo Sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history.
Energy
The famous theoretical physicist Richard Feynman wrote in 11963 HE, “It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is.” Given a mind as gifted as Feynman’s is purported to have found the concept of energy difficult, it is most likely a daunting task for the rest of us to truly understand energy. In the years since his famous lecture series, many advancements and discoveries in fundamental physics have occurred.
Today, scientifically, energy is defined as the capacity to do work. So, while we have a working definition, arguably no one still really knows what energy is. Despite our lack of understanding, we are able to describe some of the properties of energy. Broadly, we group energy into two categories. Potential, or stored, energy and kinetic, or working, energy. There are many forms of energy, e.g., heat, light, motion, electrical, chemical, and gravitational.
Energy Trouble
As alluded to, energy is a tricky subject. As an abstraction, it is difficult to completely get a grip on what it is. In some sense, it is a bit like money (and at the same time, nothing like money). An accounting tool that we all feel like we know and understand. We interact with it frequently, but fundamentally, it is really hard to explain what it really is. Fundamentally, money comes down to trust. A social contract agreeing to the exchange or storage of perceived value.
Money Trouble
The analogy is more apt today given the rise of digital currencies, both centralised (i.e., the zeros and ones used in conventional computer banking), and decentralised (e.g., cryptocurrency). Contrary to popular wisdom, the most distinct difference in digital currency databases has more to do with the location of the locus of control rather than the nature of the currency itself. Ironically decentralised currencies centralise the responsibility to the user. Whereas centralised currencies decentralised the responsibility to the state or banking body. For example, if a cryptocurrency user loses their encryption key, they are the only source of blame and solution. In contrast, a digital fiat currency user operating in the traditional banking system who forgets their banking pass key can rely on the bank for assistance.
Being Begets Believing
The commonality in currency types is that they both boil down to who or what is behind the trust that you place in the medium of exchange/store of value. However, energy, unlike money, has a real physical world value behind rather than an abstract one reliant on human belief. Money ceases to have its value, fiat or otherwise, if collectively people stop believing in it. Commodity currencies (e.g., gold coins) do carry a degree of value behind the medium beyond the abstraction of currency. I can use gold for electronics or medical or dental devices, which gives it value beyond our beliefs about wealth and its exchange. Energy, however, is not dependent on belief. Try not to believe in potential gravitational energy and jump from a high surface to see what happens. Though, at present, energy is also given a human belief value and is used as an abstraction for exchange.
Energy Errors
Many of us feel that we have a general idea of what energy is. However, at a more technical level, it turns out many of us are wrong. In preparing this post, I was confronted with the fact that some of my fundamental assumptions about energy are in error. It turns out that I am not alone, as evidenced by this paper from 12013 HE, “The Trouble with Chemical Energy: Why Understanding Bond Energies Requires an Interdisciplinary Systems Approach.” The paper discusses how “helping students understand ‘chemical energy’ is notoriously difficult.” The authors highlight that this issue is systematic and stems from three major sources. One is the language and the approach used in biology and common language to discuss energy. Two, physics and physical sciences often approach energy from the macroscopic level rather than the microscopic/molecular. And three, chemistry courses fail to link molecular (microscopic) and macroscopic ideas about energy.
We will revisit this later when we discuss energy conversion and chemical bonds instalment three …
Energy is Life Force: Resisting Entropy
At an energetic level, in a mostly non-hippie sense of the phrase, life is a continual process of using energy to organize matter to stop the decay into disorder. The more technical term for this disorder or chaos is entropy. Entropy is a tricky concept in my mind. It is often defined as “a measure of the disorder of a system.” Another way to think about entropy is that it is how much energy is not available to do useful work. The more disordered a system and the higher the entropy, the less of a system’s energy is available to do work. The tendency of a system toward maximum entropy is the basis of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. For a more in-depth look at what entropy is, check out this video by Sabine Hossenfelder. And, as fate would have it, in the process of writing this post, Derek Muller at Veritasium released a video on entropy, “The Most Misunderstood Concept in Physics.” Muller gives a concise definition of entropy as the dispersion of energy.
It takes energy, i.e., work, to prevent entropy from taking over your life system’s order and throwing it into disorder or death. The energy for that organisational work ultimately comes from the Sun. The Sun gives us concentrated organised packets of energy that Earth and its inhabitants and structures disperse as entropy, yet in the process harness some of the energy to do useful work. What then is work? Well, this will be what I wax poetic on next post…
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