Musical-Mathematical-Meaningful Facts

Units of Energy

Today we are going to take a little tour up the energy scale in an attempt to musicalize the facts, such as they are known.A Btu, the British Thermal Unit, is a small amount of energy: the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 lb. of water by one degree F. This is about the energy released by one burning wooden match. Obviously, this is not a huge expenditure of energy. In fact it is quite tiny (although joules, which we will get to in a moment, are even smaller). But even so, the relative slightness of the Btu's is the reason why they are measured in millions, billions, and quadrillions.

Let us continue to crawl up the energy scale and take a leap in the low hundreds, considering the apple, which has a long history in poetry, as one is reminded immediately of Milton's Paradise Lost ---- "Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit of that Forbidd'n Tree, whose mortal tast Brought Death into the World, and all our Woe" -- and it is not without interest in this line that Newton, too, had a mythical connection with the apple, considering that gravity is also a kind of Fall from Grace ---well, as I say, the Apple. It possesses some 400 Btu's, represented in its storage or creation or in the eating of it. It is amazing that so much trouble has come into the world from this fruit with its modest endowment of 400 British Thermal Units, but that is the way of troubles. They start out as little problems and when unattended to become the colossal and unending situations in which the human race finds itself stuck. Such as Original Sin.

My aim in this, dear Reader, is to present Energy in the guise of Integrated Knowledge, in which are united (at least in intention) science, art, and religion. For it is one of my pet theories that the world's best thinkers are integrated, and that they are not only awake and attentive to reality, but they also exhibit modesty, humor, and a lack of self-importance.

Be that as it may, let us continue with our energetic ramble. A joule, which I promised to talk about, before I got side-tracked on Original Sin, is 1/1055th of a British Thermal Unit: or, as one more commonly puts it, one Btu = 1055 joules. If a Btu is slight, a joule, so to speak, is "nearly nothing," however Gianfranco Vidali once calculated that it took about 10⁶⁸joules to create the universe, which shows what "nearly nothing" can do, as long as you have enough of it.

Our First Million

Not, alas, in the bank. A million Btu's equals approximately 8 gal. motor gasoline, 90 lbs. of coal, 125 lbs. oven-dried wood, and approximately one and one/fourth days of U.S. energy consumption per capita. (This figure is about ten years old.) Oddly, the idea that it takes about 20 million Btu to fabricate a polyester suit somehow sticks in your mind.

Moving Up to One Billion

A billion is 1 with nine zeroes. Gianfranco Vidali's energy web module reports that it consumed about 5.6 billion Btu for the Apollo 17 mission to reach the Moon. The Hiroshima atomic bomb released about 80 billion Btu.

Keep Climbing: One Trillion

A trillion is a 1 with 12 zeroes. One thousand trans-Atlantic jet flights consumed about 2.4 trillion Btu (in 1993).

Finally: the Quadrillion

One with fifteen zeroes. This is, Ladies and Gentlemen, "a meaningful unit of Btu." Not that the others weren't. But this is where governments and statistics get into the act. I have it on the authority of the United States Department of Energy that the U.S. consumed 97.7 quadrillion Btu total energy equivalent in 2002. In 1993, the U.S. consumed 84 quad energy, analyzed as follows:

Sliding Down the Scale of Joules

My source informs me that it takes 10³³ joules to keep the earth moving in its orbit. A severe earthquake (Richter 8) is 10¹⁸ joules. A human heartbeat is 0.5 joules. And finally let us not forget the lowly cricket: his chirrup measures 10^-3 joules.

There is something intriguing -- as well as disquieting -- about these numbers.

It is not only that the scale makes no distinction between "constructive" and

"destructive" forces, much as the U.S. GNP only measures monetary transactions. Yet each one of us, as we go about our business, is somehow concretely and specifically fitted into the scale. But we have to go beyond the numbers to hear the music of life itself.