Friday, August 11, 12023 Human Era (HE)
- Continuation Explanation
- Work (Queue the Musical Interlude)
- The Energy Dilemma
- Back to the Building Blocks: How Crazy is Carbon!
Continuation Explanation
This post is a continuation of a series on energy and its relationship to stand up paddleboarding (SUP). The impetus for the post came after a conversation with a client on energy systems. We got into some fairly intricate details, and I realized that a refresher for myself was in order. I found that writing a few posts on anatomy and biomechanics specific to SUP served as a great review of my anatomical knowledge, and I thought it would be a fun exercise to refresh on some energy metabolism physiology.
The first instalment covered some background basics before branching into a rant on the semantics and sex-typing, and it finished by attempting to define what energy is. This post continues from where we left off talking about ‘work.’
Work (Queue the Musical Interlude)
In physics and biology, “work” can be defined as “the energy transferred to or from an object via the application of force along a displacement.” Nothing is free, and as we saw in the first post, our ‘free energy’ comes from the Sun (more on this later). You can’t get something from nothing. At least, that is what the first law of thermodynamics tells us. The Sun obtained its energy from the Universe, but the origins of the Universe remain mysterious.
Universal God
The Universe is filled with energy. But its origin (both energy’s and the Universe’s) is beyond our knowledge. We just need to start with the base fact that the Universe is full of energy. This is the exception to the adage above that you can’t get something from nothing. Either the Universe did get something from nothing, or it always was. Science gives us lots of answers, but this isn’t one of them (a touch more on this later).
I recall that in my grade 12 physics class, two classmates were getting frustrated with their inability to make sense of energy. After coming to an epiphany, they blurted out that “god is energy!” As far as I could tell, their epiphany was in jest. But to me, it stood out as perhaps a profound proclamation. As far as I can tell, there is no god or gods, at least not in the religious sense of an omnipotent creator/creators. Or, more specifically, like in the Abrahamic faith tradition where an omnipotent agential being worthy of worship is the creator and controller of the Universe. But I am willing to concede to a god-controlled Universe if that god is impotent and is an abstraction of the universal (pun intended) laws that govern the Unive… um… Cosmos.
There is something that is powering life as we know it. If you want to call that life force god instead of energy, so be it. I just don’t think this god (or energy) is worthy of religious worship. Reverence, yes. Worship no.
The Energy Dilemma
As far as we can tell, in order for life to exist, entropy must be evaded. Living cells exist in a state far from chemical equilibrium, exhibiting substantial internal free energy. Thus, if cells undergo death and decay, moving towards chemical equilibrium, a considerable amount of energy is released into the environment in the form of heat. To temporarily offset this end, cellular life requires ‘free’ energy (see below for more details). In order to power the process of the chemical disequilibrium of a cell, cellular life needed to come up with a system of running redox reactions to move electrons along pathways from donors to acceptors to liberate (free) energy for useful work.
These complex interactions connect physics, chemistry, and biology. Physics at the quantum level determines why chemicals behave the way they do and ultimately the more complex macromolecular interactions of biology. The building blocks of life are based on the fundamental properties of the structures of the elements that determine their interactions.
Did Someone Say Free!
In the context of thermodynamics, “free energy” has a specific meaning. Simply stated, free energy, or more specifically Gibbs free energy, is the energy available in a system to do useful work. The concept was developed in the 11870’s (HE) by Josiah Willard Gibbs, originally under the term “available energy.” Perhaps a more intuitive term, since “free” in this context means available to do work. Denoted as G, Gibbs’ free energy combines enthalpy and entropy into a single value. The change in free energy, ΔG, is equal to the sum of the enthalpy plus the product of the temperature and entropy of the system. For any math aficionados, the equation is often presented as the following:
ΔG = ΔH – TΔS
Where ΔG is the change in free energy, ΔH is the change in enthalpy, T is temperature, and ΔS is the change in entropy.
Wait…What is Enthalpy?
Enthalpy is a thermodynamic property of a system. It has a more technical definition (obviously). But, we are already so deep into the weeds that I’ll leave you to investigate that on your own. Simply, enthalpy is the capacity of a system to do non-mechanical work and the capacity to release heat. Or, most simply, just think of enthalpy as the heat released from a system.
But if Nothing is Free, What is ‘Free’ Energy?
Barring the mysterious origins of the Universe, the energy in the Universe is fixed or constant to the best of our knowledge. Surprisingly, that constant might even be zero, as per the zero-energy Universe hypothesis, which, to me, makes little to no sense. Actually, during a re-reading edit, the zero-energy Universe hypothesis suddenly made sense, as it dawned on me that it provides a way for the first law of thermodynamics (i.e., the conservation of energy) not to be violated. In order for energy to remain constant, universally, having it at a fixed value makes sense. What is strange is having it at a value that is zero. Though arguably, that solves the how you get something from nothing problem. Bagel! And, after listening to the first episode from the CBC‘s Ideas series on “The Greatest Numbers of All Time,” titled, “The story of zero: How ‘nothing’ changed the world,” I had a minor epiphany.
How to Get Something From Nothing‽ (Just a thought).
“The story of zero: How ‘nothing’ changed the world” highlights how the concept of zero was not always intuitive. For much of human history zero did not exist in our collective consciousness. The ancient Sumerians provide us with the earliest evidence of zero around 5000 HE (i.e., 5000 BCE). But once people began thinking about nothing things get strange as is explained in the podcast. The connection for me was when they discussed dividing a number by zero. While the standard solution is that it is “undefined,” the trend before reaching zero with an ever decreasing divisor/denominator, is that quotient gets larger and larger. For example:
1 ÷ 100 = 0.01
1 ÷ 10 = 0.1
1 ÷ 5 = 0.2
1 ÷ 1 = 1
1 ÷ 0.5 = 2
1 ÷ 0.1 = 10
1 ÷ 0.01 = 100
…
1 ÷ 0.000001 = 1,000,000
So could…
1 ÷ 0 = ∞
If so that gives you a whole lot of something out of nothing. And in the context of an infinite Universe, zero could be zany enough to give rise to the balance of zero energy‽
So, perhaps it is all just a giant Ponzi scheme of energy borrowing that is so big that there is always someone else to borrow from? Dealing with infinite, or near-infinite, numbers our finite faculties fail. Those numbers are “inconceivable,” to borrow from The Princess Bride. We evolved to survive under finite realities and lack the computational capabilities to truly consider such colossal counts.
In any case, as humans, we inevitably borrow the energy of the Sun by way of plants and animals that have stored energy in their physiochemical structures. When that energy is liberated and available to be used for work, it is referred to as “free energy” in thermodynamics speak. It is this free energy that we harness to power our cellular processes. The Sun gives the Earth concentrated organized energy, which the Earth and its inhabitants disperse and scramble, increasing the Universe’s entropy, and allowing life to flourish!
Plants and other animals do the work for us as humans, essentially repackaging sunlight into more usable parcels for us to consume. For a summary, check out the video, “What is Energy?” below from Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Back to the Building Blocks: How Crazy is Carbon!
Bringing this back to how physics governs chemistry, which governs biology, check out the example below of why carbon became the backbone of life. Essentially, it is a race to the bottom, that is, the lowest stable energy state. Keep this in mind for when we get to chemical bonds (in instalment three).
A Brief History of Life: Yet Another Segue
It is estimated that the Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, and it is believed that the conditions for life were present as early as 4.3 billion years ago (for a great visual of the timeline check out this article by Tim Urban, “Putting Time In Perspective” from Wait But Why). The oldest known fossils are around 3.7 billion years old. Somewhere in that half-of-a-billion-year window, life began. The earliest organisms likely fed on carbon compounds forming in the early Earth’s ocean, but there is no way to be certain. Then, some organisms developed the ability to harness sunlight as their energy source. The Earth’s early atmosphere was anoxic at the time, lacking oxygen, but had an abundance of carbon dioxide and methane. Most likely, the early organisms used hydrogen, hydrogen sulphide, and methane as their electron donors. Water was around, but the biological hardware needed to hijack its hydrolysis had not come into existence.
The next instalment will cover the craziness of cyanobacteria harnessing Helios, the fantastic process of photosynthesis…
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