Reading Journal 4 - Conservation of Energy

In this section of Six Easy Pieces, Feynman discusses the law of conservation of energy and its applications. The law of conservation of energy says that no matter is lost or gained by processes. Without the law of conservation of energy we wouldn’t know very much. If the law of conservation of energy didn’t exist then we could not know the energy of a photon, the specific heat of any element, the amount of energy required to do anything. This is because without knowing where all of this energy went, you cannot know what the energy was used on. So if we didn’t know the law of conservation of energy, then every energy value would consist of kinetic energy, potential energy, heat energy, and all the different kinds of energy, however, the law of conservation of energy allows us to know that if we add up all of these energies before and after a use of energy, we will find the same value for energy. This allows us to figure out each component of the total energy and specifically identify one of the values. The law of conservation of energy does not have to be applied on a small scale we can apply the law to the amount of energy in existence now and in the past. If all of our energy is in chemical bonds, nuclear energy between protons and electrons, and gravity, and all the sources of these are constant (gravity’s being mass) then the amount of energy that exists today must be the same as the amount of energy when whatever happened to create everything happened. Feynman also strays from the topic of conservation and more about energy and the amounts of energy we have access to today. Feynman claims that “(w)ith 150 gallons of running water a minute, you have enough fuel to supply all the energy which is used in the United States today!” (86). This just shows how much energy there is still left in the world. All we need to do is find a way to harness this energy and then this energy crisis that the world is in now will not exist.