Here's the test: if you sweat away one can of beer, how many pitches will you have thrown?
If you have the energy, click here to reveal
Forget about Einstein - his E=mc2 formula is mostly useful for boring public transportation train rides while one desperately stares at one's wrist watch – Before that there was Emilie du Chatelet who lived in an age where relativity was the bad behavior to be hidden from the solid and sound principles our fore fathers loved. A classic education holds that E=1/2mv2 and this is truly the formula historians and media types should popularize.
Here's a quote Albert Einstein once said, "You teach me baseball and I'll teach you relativity...no we must not. You will learn about relativity faster than I learn baseball." Eh? Self admittedly not smart enough to learn about baseball; not cool.
Why?
Picture this - under an apple tree if you wish - Newton and his German counterpart Leibnitz arguing bitterly about this energy matter. The question : in what way is the energy of moving things proportional to the speed at which they travel? While both our powdered wigged heads discovered profound calculus functions (complicated enough to do much harm in college math) it took the charm and sweetness of French lady Emilie du Chatelet to anticipate everything that was going to happen next. She found immediate live applications for calculus and derivatives in the stock market where she made a bundle. She solved the energy equation. And she had lots of fun. Vis Viva in latin. The Force...
VIS VIVA E is E=1/2mv2
E is for energy in [BTU] or [kWh] or [J] or [Nm] or [kgm2/s2] (where a N is a kg*m/s2)
m is for mass in [kg]
v is for velocity in [m/s], velocity squared turns into [m2/s2]
thus E is in [kg*m2/s2 ]shuffle this into [(kg*m/s2)*m] where we recognize the [kgm/s2] as the newton [N]. Here our result measured in [Nm] (newton*meters) is a unit for energy readily converted into anything you want such as kilowatthours [kWh], joules [J], and the ubiquitous British Thermal Unit [BTU] (3414 BTU per kWh)
And here is the best part and particularly interesting to steam heating issues, Emilie du Chatelet discovered two things that she included in her notes added to her translation of Newton's book. Primo, she anticipated what the first law of thermodynamics was going to be: the conservation of energy, and, secundo, she also speculated about the propagation of heat through radiation and predicted the presence of infra red heat waves – all this in the early 1700's, way before our futuristic flux capacitors that actually made it on TV.
And so we have cool people doing cool things with hot energy. All the numbers in the table below flow directly from the VIS VIVA equation. Easy stuff to jot on the back of a napkin.
TASK AT HAND
BRITISH THERMAL UNIT
One burning match
1 BTU
One flying baseball pitch at 85 MPH
0.1 BTU
7000 matches* or 1 lb of wood
7000 BTU
Turning 16 oz of water into water vapor
1000 BTU
One flying bullet, typical hunting caliber
2 BTU
One flying bullet, big game
5 BTU
*I have actually counted the matches in a box, yes, I did
Let's see what a cool baseball pitcher can do if we expect him to sweat away the content of one can of beer on the playing field. Oh yes we can... it isn't fun if you can't quantify it... so let's see
One can of beer evaporated is equivalent to 1000 BTU. Meanwhile, each and every pitch takes 0.1 BTU, thus, with a mere 10,000 pitches – we'll also get to launch away the energy of 1000 BTU into the atmosphere.
Next, if Homer Bailey can reach the stratosphere, we can certainly pitch every second and, thus, we'll go through our needed 10,000 throws in a mere 3 hours while taking an included 15 minute break for drinking the beer. Really?!!??
Who's up for a beer?
And now we also know why beer comes in a pitcher – so that we can ponder these issues long enough. 10,000 throws, a whole pitcher, might be a bit much for my arm.
What blows my mind though is this... here – say a saber toothed tiger lunges at you on the field– what to do? Well, easy, lob twenty baseballs at it and it will collapse. Or, alternately, hold two burning matches in front of it and, voila, the effect on the beast will be the same as the hunting riffle bullet. Minus the bang.
*** 😉
We can't see energy, we just feel it and our intuition most often leads us astray. Nowadays, any common TV watching kid will readily assume that the energy contained in a regular bullet will always be enough to topple over a semi-tractor trailer, project it into the air and make it burst into an atomic blast – all that from a bb gun no less. As seen on TV? Watcher beware.
We can't see the energy that pours out of a steam radiator, but we certainly feel the knock-out effect it has on the cold. Radiators are striped to pitch and have the perfect heating game.
