Energy: a Rough Guide for Teachers

Energy: a Rough Guide for Teachers

Part 1 THE ISSUES
Jon Ogborn

Energy: both common knowledge and hard concept

Energy is a really two-faced idea. On the one hand, it is part of everyday chat (My, youre full of energy today); it appears in advertisements (a bite of X gives you instant energy); it plays a role in political argument (What renewable energy sources do we need?). Here it is assumed that everyone knows what they are talking about. Certainly we all get used to the ways in which the word is used, and feel more or less comfortable with them. In consequence, a teacher can talk about energy without being challenged, as long as they use the word in one of these socially understood ways. From that point of view, getting started in teaching about energy seems to be no problem at all. On the other hand, energy (and power the rate of transfer of energy) are scientifically rather sophisticated terms. A transfer of energy from one thing to another has a not well-known unit (the joule). It isnt obvious that multiplying a force by a displacement in the direction of the force gives you anything sensible, let alone an amount of energy transfer. Nor does the name work for this help much, given its other everyday uses. Amounts of energy are supposed to be conserved always to stay the same seemingly in direct conflict with everyday usage where energy is gained, produced, lost, used up, saved, wasted etc. In consequence, a teacher talking about energy in the scientific sense soon does get challenged or misunderstood. So starting to teach about energy does get to be a problem after all. And we have to add to this some further difficulties or issues. Asked, Well what is energy then, really?, teachers soon get stuck. Few people seem willing to tell even them, in simple terms, let alone suggest what they should tell students. Lots of books seem just to play word games: Breakfast energy labels what you get from breakfast; chemical energy labels what you get from chemicals; kinetic energy labels what is in moving things. Where is one to stop? This kind of thing is quite easy to teach, not hard to learn, and may well gain SATS marks, but does it actually say anything? This Rough Guide is about these issues. It tries to sketch out some practical answers, but also to go deeper and to clarify a bit where some of these difficulties come from. It starts from three propositions: 1. We must exploit to the full the everyday use of the idea, in getting started. There is nothing wrong with learning how people use a word, only gradually getting to understand it more fully. It useful to take stuff from everyday discussion, to work on in science lessons. 2. Science lessons need to add doing sums with energy values, to go beyond everyday talk. Energy and power are calculated quantities (indeed you pay for them by amount). Science teaching needs to add this quantitative aspect, beginning early.

Energy: a Rough Guide for Teachers 3. The full scientific concept of energy is remarkably sophisticated. A science student will go on extending her or his idea of energy throughout school and university. But teachers need to know more than they will tell students, to see where an idea will head in the future. The Rough Guide is in two remaining parts. The next part is about ways of setting about teaching about energy, starting from everyday commonsense thinking. A final part is about fundamentals: about what energy is, and its role in scientific thought. The second part, though not for students at all, does however contain the reasons for the suggested practical solutions in the first part.

Energy: a Rough Guide for Teachers

Part 2: PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS

Getting started how people talk
A lot of what we learn is not based on fundamental ideas and logical reasoning, but on social practice: learning how other people act, talk and think, getting to use words and ideas as other people seem to do. Thats how we learn what love, fairness, or money are. In learning science, the teachers job is often to show by example how one talks; nowhere is this more true than in teaching energy. Food and diet Food and diet is one obvious starting point, fitting smoothly into many existing schemes of work. Nearly all foods are now labelled with their energy content (how much energy is liberated when they are digested). Valuable energy lessons can be taught based on diet energy calculations. An active grown man needs around 2000 Calories per day (about 8.4 MJ per day). Women generally need a bit less. The energy has to come from burning food in the body. Most of this energy is excreted through cooling (humans run at about 100 W). Only a relatively small fraction is expended in physical activity. Having collected labelled packets of different foods, a class can create various diets and work out their total energy content. Slimming is both an interesting and a controversial topic. By reading the energy content of fat (say butter) from the packet, you can estimate the number of grams of fat you could lose per day by restricting your food intake. It is surprisingly little. [A typical figure is 3000 kJ (3 MJ) per 100 g of fat.] You find, as we all know, that it is hard to lose weight and easy to put it back on. To include calculations about weight loss through exercise, you need to know how to calculate energy for movements and for lifting weights. That comes later. The outcome is equally dispiriting to the couch potato: you need a LOT of exercise to burn off a little fat. However, the good news is that exercise also helps by improving circulation and metabolism, so that your body starts using energy more rapidly, even when at rest. This is an area where biology teachers can easily feel comfortable, and where basic physics ideas about energy can be introduced. Notice the need to introduce rate of use of energy (e.g. MJ per day) as well as simple amounts of energy. However, to play a full part in teaching about energy, it needs to be linked to other things: to energy sums related to home heating, fuel tanks, kettles, light bulbs, insulation, as well as healthy bodies and good eating habits. Energy needed to make things hot Heating water makes a useful start on measuring amounts of energy. An electric kettle is marked with the rate at which it delivers energy its power. This is in watts, and is often about 2 kW. Multiply by the number of seconds it is switched on for, and you

Energy: a Rough Guide for Teachers have the number of joules delivered. Heating a kettle of water to boiling point takes about 0.5 MJ, for example. Leaving a 100 W lamp on for 3 hours uses a bit more than 1 MJ. Its worth comparing this with the amount of energy provided by a single meal. Energy of foodstuffs can now be measured, as well as read off the packet. Your present scheme of work probably has an experiment burning a foodstuff (it used to be peanuts) to heat water. Previous work with a kettle will have shown that it takes about 4.2 kJ to warm 1 kg of water by each degree Celsius. This is the quantity of energy also known as one Calorie. So students can learn how the data on food labels can be obtained. The teaching trick here is to avoid calculating energy exchanges from electrical equations (volts times amps), but to use the stated power of electrical appliances instead, together with a clock, to measure energy supplied. A Joule meter is a useful extra device (its essentially the same as the domestic electricity meter). One that makes an audible click or visible flash for every joule passing is a valuable reminder of the meaning of rate of flow of energy. Notice the early importance of power (in watts) as well as of energy (in joules). Most important or interesting things about energy have to do with energy on the way in or out, not with the amount just sitting there. Thats why the rate at which energy is shifted needs to be brought in early (see above, about food and diet). Household fuel bills Collect from the class examples of household fuel bills: gas, electricity, oil. They can show how much energy is consumed in the home, and give pointers to where savings might be made. It is actually a very helpful fact that there are different kinds of fuel. The fuel bill for gas tells you how many cubic metres of gas you have burned. The bill for oil tells you how many litres of heating oil has been put in your tank. The electricity bill tells you how many kilowatt hours you have consumed. But all of them also convert these amounts to a common unit: say mega joules. [Note that 1 kW hour is 3.6 MJ] The fact that all fuel uses can be expressed in a common unit reflects the deeper fact that fuel sources are interchangeable as far as energy is concerned. Heating a bath full of water by burning oil or by using electricity uses the same amount of energy for the water, even though the two methods may waste different amounts by letting energy leak elsewhere. There are teaching resources for estimating energy savings, for example by how much loft insulation can reduce the rate of energy leakage through the roof of a house. The teaching trick is to use the units for electricity supplies to give the units for energy and power: Power = rate of supply of energy 1 watt = 1 joule per second 1 kW = 1000 J per second (1 kJ per second) 1 MW = 1 MJ per second = 1000 kJ per second 4

Energy: a Rough Guide for Teachers This calls for some work with the labels on a variety of electrical appliances. Each has its power on the label (even your computer). One can compare kettles, electric irons, refrigerators, washing machines, ovens, hair driers etc.

Energy use in society

Many schemes of work make space for discussion of the social consequences of energy use. Electricity comes from burning fuel It soon becomes important to discuss the fact that electrical power comes, via wires, from power stations that burn fuel. The kettle at home is heated, indirectly, by the gas, oil or coal burned in a power station. This is also needed for any discussion of Greenhouse Effect, Global warming, etc. Save it The above provides a good platform for later discussions of energy saving, especially domestic saving. There are good resources for making simple estimates of, for example, the rate of energy loss through insulated and non-insulated roofs. Also useful would be comparisons of the energy needed to heat water for a bath or a shower. Do sums early Including such simple sums about energy and power is very important. It introduces the units that are in practical use, without much formality. It introduces both energy and power (rate of energy supply or use - a bit of trouble taken early over amount and rate of change will be repaid later). More important still, it makes it clear that energy changes are the kind of thing you have to calculate, not just look at or chat about. At the same time, doing sums like this gives students a feeling of definiteness and practical use of the ideas. That will probably work better than logical definitions to make them feel secure.

Conservation: you cant make it or destroy it, only shift it around

At some point, not necessarily very early on, the question of why we believe that energy is conserved needs to be addressed. Up to now this has been partly assumed, partly ignored. It has been taken as given that the energy coming into the kettle via the electrical supply goes into the water, and warms it up. It has been taken as a dietary fact that the energy supplied by the food you eat all has to go somewhere, even if some is stored in extra fat. It has been taken as hard financial fact that you have to pay for energy you lose through the roof of your house. And so on. At the same time, the language of losing or saving energy does rather suggest that it can vanish away. Machines cant magnify energy There is a very simple way to introduce the new idea that energy exchanges are measured in terms of force x displacement, and to show why we think that energy is conserved.

Energy: a Rough Guide for Teachers Promise the class that you can lift a student in the air with one finger. Bring out a long plank, pivoted near one end, stand the student at that end and push down with one finger on the other end. You can magnify a force. Levers like this do it (of course the weight of the plank also helps!). But magnifying the force comes at a price. The distance you can move something with that bigger force becomes less. Other practical examples illustrate the point: screwdrivers, spanners, car jacks, pulley blocks and tackle. [Visits to a garage and a hardware shop can provide much useful real-life kit at reasonable cost. Machines are best when they can do a real job of work. Dont forget bicycle gears too.] You always find that the output force multiplied by the distance moved by the force (in the direction that it acts) is never more than the input force multiplied by its displacement. In ideal, well oiled situations they can be almost equal, but you never get out more than you put in. And what got put in and taken out? Answer: energy, measured by the work involved, where work is the quantity calculated from force and displacement. Shift a joule Hang a 100 g bag of beans (weight about 1 N) on a string over a pulley. Have students pull the string out by 1 metre. Say that they are feeling what it is to put 1 J into something. Try measuring energy in and energy out for some machines (use a Newton meter for the force). Friction makes hot A good machine puts out almost as much energy as is put in. But most machines waste some, because the parts of the machine rub together. But where does the wasted energy go? It goes to making parts of the machine hotter. Sooner or later youll need to tell a story about what getting hotter means, in energy terms. It just means that the invisible atoms or molecules are moving about faster. They have stolen energy for themselves. And it isnt easy to claim it back again, because they have shared it out randomly in tiny parcels amongst a huge number of particles. There are plenty of practical examples of friction diverting energy to make something hotter. Car brakes are a case where we want the energy out of the moving car as speedily as possible. Exercise bicycles let students feel how what seems a large amount of mechanical work done produces only what seems like a modest heating effect (you wouldnt want to boil a kettle with such a bike!). The key teaching point is not to let friction become a kind of excuse for things not working properly. Its the way energy delivered by moving forces gets inside matter. Energy is seen to be conserved only if you count it all The reason why it took a long time (a century or so) for people to accept that energy really is conserved is that energy of movement seems obviously not to be. Drop or throw a stone, and it soon stops moving. The warming effect on the stone or ground is small and not easily detected. And anyway, what does getting hotter have to do with moving? The answer is that being hotter amounts to having molecules moving faster. 6

Energy: a Rough Guide for Teachers

This is not an intellectual story with which many younger students will sympathise. It is better to tell it much later. For now, it is better to have started with examples of energy going into heating things (kettle, burning fuel, food), and to treat this as on a par with energy visible in movement and energy transferred by displacing a force. In other words, go with how people actually talk and act today, not with historical puzzles and disputes. [There is a very pretty demonstration, however. Prepare two trolleys, each with a good spring. Show that one bounces back very well when sent against a hard massive wall. But on the second trolley, mount a small crystal model made of polystyrene balls linked by quite floppy springs. Send this into the same wall, and the trolley stops dead, with all the balls quivering. Its worth the trouble to make up.]

Helpful language for energy-talk

Some ways of talking about energy are clearer and more helpful than others. Energy stores It is helpful to talk about energy stores. A stretched spring is one. A spring, or a rubber band, can rather obviously store energy. You do work to stretch them (or to squash the spring), and you can get back pretty much the same amount of energy when they relax. These then are the best iconic examples for grasping what potential energy is all about. It is energy in a mechanical store. This way of talking offers a way to defer the term potential energy for a while, if it proves difficult. You can feel a similar storage when magnets are pushed together or pulled apart. The example nearly all books give of potential energy is perhaps the most difficult of all. It is the gravitational energy of a lifted mass. Now the energy is said to be in the lifted object while for a spring it is said to be in the spring. If you have the courage, you could say that the energy is stored between the Earth and the lifted object (in the gravitational field). The trouble is of course that a SATS marker might score that truthful answer as wrong! Another kind of energy store is a mixture of fuel and oxygen. In this case bonds between carbon and oxygen atoms can snap shut, releasing energy in a fire or explosion. It is common to talk about just the fuel for example petrol as the energy store, but remember that for the chemical spring to snap shut, there must be oxygen too. Energy carriers It is often helpful to think of energy being carried from one place to another. For example, light carries energy from the Sun to the Earth. Light is not itself energy it is after all an electromagnetic wave, or a stream of photons (however you care to look at it). But energy does travel with the light. The same is true of radio waves. In a microwave oven microwaves carry energy from the microwave generator to the interior of the food. Other kinds of waves carry energy too, for example ocean waves. Electric current in a circuit is another energy carrier. It is helpful to think about a power circuit as like a way of piping energy from one place to another. The National 7

Energy: a Rough Guide for Teachers Grid distributes energy from a number of power stations, via the wires and cables, to homes and factories. It is often handy to think of moving matter as carrying energy, too. A strong wind delivers energy to a wind turbine. But it is equally often better to think of the moving mass as storing energy. A train has to be given energy to get it moving, and energy has to be taken from it to stop the train. This is what we call kinetic energy. Energy in hot stuff If you give more energy to be shared out amongst the atoms and molecules of some piece of matter, it usually gets hotter. But hotness is not energy. Something hot (like the surface of the Sun, or a flame in a gas cooker, rather easily gives up energy to cooler things (energy goes without help from hotter to cooler). What counts is the average energy per particle, not the total energy stored. So hot objects have, as it were, very concentrated energy that easily spreads out and dilutes, warming other things. This is what lies behind talk about heat is a form of energy. It is best to refer, as soon as possible, to the sharing out of movement energy amongst all the particles. Energy conversions So far, nothing has been said about the language of transforming energy, or of converting energy from one form to another. This is a very common way of talking, but it has its problems. Particularly, it is in danger of saying nothing at all. For example, A torch converts chemical energy in the battery to light energy. All this says is that a chemical reaction happens and light comes out. The danger is that forms of energy get labels from kinds of event, so that a process (like a torch lighting, or a ball being thrown) just gets re-described in a different set of words. Because the language of transforming energy does so little work, it is easy to teach and learn. It is not hard to get students to translate throwing a ball into muscle energy is changed into kinetic energy. But it is dangerously close to being no more than a game of words. Instead, we have talked about energy being stored or going from place to place. This puts the emphasis on where the energy is and why, not on renaming it once it goes from one thing to another. However, the really important thing is to work from very early on with actual quantities of energy, to do plenty of simple sums about amounts of energy and rates of delivery. This is where there is real payoff; where something is actually being said, and understanding has something to get a grip on.

Energy: a Rough Guide for Teachers

Part 3 FUNDAMENTALS What is energy?

If asked, Well, what exactly is energy, then?, a lot of people pussyfoot around. Youll find answers like: energy is the go of things energy is the capacity to do work energy is a mathematical quantity that is conserved in an isolated system The modern answer (the best that can be given so far) is surprising: energy is the source of gravity Pick up any nearby massive object, say a paperweight. Heft it in your hand. Feel the downward pull of the Earth on it. Feel how you have to push it to move it to and fro. You are feeling its energy, commonly known as its mass. This is the meaning of Einsteins best known equation; E = mc2 A moving object has energy. For Einstein, an object at rest is moving, but in time. So as you and the paperweight sit still, you travel towards the future. Your mass, and the mass of the paperweight, is the part of the energy associated with just being at rest, that is, just travelling in time, not in space. So really Einsteins equation needs to be written: Erest = mc2 According to Newtons gravitational theory, mass was the source of the gravitational field. Masses attract one another, and all that. According to Einstein, the mass is (normally) just the largest part of the total energy. It is really the energy that gravitates, with the rest energy (alias mass) usually being by far the largest contribution. Also, this rest energy can be released, as radiation. If a particle and antiparticle meet, they can annihilate one another, with the rest energy (mass-energy) travelling off carried by a pair of photons. You see now why other people werent telling you what energy really is (assuming they themselves knew). And I havent done more than sketch it in here, to give a sense of what the questions are. Rest energy compared Because the speed of light c = 3 108 m s-1, the rest energy of a 1 kg mass is: 9 1016 J This is about 3 years output of a large 1000 MW power station. Any extra energy the mass has (for example 100 J by being lifted up 1 metre) is a mere flea-bite. An object lifted up against the Earths gravitational pull does have more energy, and so gravitates more it is heavier. But by so little that we never notice. The equivalent extra mass is only: 100 J/c2 = 10-15 kg approximately.

Energy: a Rough Guide for Teachers But it is not nothing. It is roughly the mass of a microbe 1/1000 mm on a side. You could even see the microbe in a microscope. But it is much too small to be detected by simply weighing. You see why energy was not first discovered by noticing the extra weight it could give to objects. Think of it like this. Everything around us has a huge amount of rest energy (alias mass). This is like a vast ocean of energy. Floating on top, like a thin oil film, is all the extra energy that we notice, calculate, and pay for. Pretty well all the energy that we talk of in science classes belongs to this tiny extra bit. This tiny bit on top is very important for many practical purposes. But unfortunately this doesnt mean that it has a simple, clear fundamental meaning. The real meaning lies much deeper (as above). Measuring changes to the tiny bit on top is done by measuring amounts of work (force x distance, or some equivalent calculation, such as electric charge x potential difference). This is why energy has often been characterised as the capacity to do work. Nothing wrong with this statement, except that its rather opaque. Simpler perhaps to say that energy changes are measured in units of work.

Energy is conserved
Energy is conserved. What does this really mean, and why is it true? Water is more or less conserved. So the amount of water in a reservoir can always be calculated from amount that was there some time ago, plus the amount that has come in, minus the amount that has gone out (you may have to take account of evaporation as well as water drawn off). Another way of saying the same thing is that water cant be made or destroyed. For there to be more, it has to come in; for there to be less it has to go out. Energy is similar. If you take any volume of space, then the total energy inside that volume at a given time is always the amount that was there earlier, plus the total amount that has come in through the surface, minus the total amount that has gone out through the surface. Another way of saying the same thing is that energy cant be made or destroyed. For there to be more, it must have come from somewhere; for there to be less it must have gone somewhere else. This means that energy can quite correctly be thought of as rather like a fluid. You may correctly picture it as stored or as flowing. You may sensibly ask where it is, where it is going, where it is coming from. [It is not exactly like water. For example, you can measure an amount (in J) and a rate of loss or gain (in W). But you cant ask at what velocity the stuff flows, because there isnt any stuff whose particles would have a velocity. We mention this only to keep a few niggles at bay.] Why is energy conserved? Again, the modern answer is deep and surprising. If the laws governing motion are always the same from day to day or from aeon to aeon then there is a corresponding quantity that stays the same. This quantity is the energy. 10

Energy: a Rough Guide for Teachers Energy is conserved because time of day doesnt affect any law of motion. This result is fairly easy to state, but much harder to understand. It was discovered (with other similar principles) by the German mathematician Amalie (Emmy) Noether. Her work underlies all modern thinking about conserved quantities. So there is something very abstract about the idea of energy. It is a calculated quantity that must stay constant because there is no natural origin of time. So energy is rather like a fluid because it is conserved, not the other way round. It is a calculated quantity, not an observable stuff. The practical teaching implication here is that it is important to do sums about energy changes how much in, how much out and not just to talk generally about it. At the same time, energy is more than just a bit of mathematical machinery. Its real enough for you to be able to feel the attraction between your and the Earths rest energies.

Energy amongst the molecules

The fundamental fact about chemical and biochemical reactions, in which atoms and molecules re-arrange themselves in different combinations is very simple: The molecules dont care! That is, all reactions from rusting through burning to tissue building or muscles contracting occur through purely random behaviour of the molecules, which just happens, on average, to produce the overall desired (or undesired) result. The trick of getting such a reaction to do what you want is to arrange the conditions such that the molecules end up most often doing what you want, just by chance. Notice that this story (the basis of all thermodynamics) does not yet mention energy. Especially, it doesnt think of energy as what makes things happen. Diffusion as an example When things happen by chance, what happens most often is what can happen in many ways. For example, molecules in gases or liquids diffuse from where the concentration is high to where the concentration is lower. They go down the concentration slope. But they do this simply because where there are more molecules of one kind, there are more of them able to move. And molecules rarely go from where there are fewer to where there are more, because there are fewer around to do so. When the concentrations equalise, molecules go by chance equally in all directions. Energy flow from hot to cold The spontaneous thermal flow of energy down a temperature gradient (from hotter to colder) is in many ways like diffusion. In a hot region, molecules have a large average random energy of motion. Colliding with slower moving molecules they are more likely to lose energy than gain it. So the energy concentration tends to equalise, too. [Energy flow is not completely like diffusion. This is because diffusing particles dont change in the process, but lumps of energy arent particles in the same way. The size of the lumps (quanta) can change as energy goes from one molecule to another.] 11

Energy: a Rough Guide for Teachers

Reactions that release energy Many reactions or physical changes release energy. This happens when weaker bonds break and stronger bonds form. A physical example is steam condensing or water freezing. A chemical example is combustion. A biological example is the release of energy from adenosine triphosphate in water. [One phosphate ion is detached and clamps hard onto a water molecule, releasing energy.] There is a tendency for such reactions to go most often in the energy-releasing direction, because the energy released can be shared out amongst neighbouring particles in many ways. To go backward enough energy would need to be collected in one place to pull apart a strong bond, and this will rarely happen by chance if the energy has to be collected from many nearby particles. Thus energy spreading out amongst many particles is part of what gives a driving direction to exothermic changes. Explosives are especially dangerous because their reactions also create many smaller particles from fewer larger molecules, as well as releasing energy. The many smaller particles can move in more ways than the fewer larger ones. So this adds to the tendency for the reaction to go in the explosive direction. Particles getting more organised It is not true that all energy-releasing (exothermic) reactions happen in the energyreleasing direction. Water freezing is a simple example. When water freezes, stronger bonds form and energy is released. But at the same time, the organisation of the molecules becomes more rigid, less random. So the molecules can be arranged in fewer ways. Whether water freezes or not depends on the balance between there being fewer arrangements of molecules and their energy because of the creation of a regular crystal structure, and there being more ways because of the extra energy shared out amongst the particles. The short way to say this is that the change goes in the direction in which the total entropy goes up. That is, in the direction in which the total number of arrangements of particles and their energy goes up. Depending on the balance, this can be in either direction. For water freezing, the balance changes over at a temperature of 273 K. Particles getting less organised Water evaporating is an example of molecules getting less organised having more space to move about in and more ways to move. That produces a tendency for the change to happen. But at the same time, to free a molecule from the liquid, hydrogen bonds have to be broken and energy has (randomly, just by chance) to arrive in sufficient amount at the right place to do so. This can happen, but not often. It happens less rarely when the water is made hotter, because each particle has more energy of movement. As a result, hot water evaporates, even though this is an endothermic (energy concentrating) change. As above, these changes go in the direction in which the entropy (number of ways of arranging the insides) goes up. In every case, simply because the molecules dont care. 12

Energy: a Rough Guide for Teachers

Free energy
Free energy is expensive, not free. But it is a useful idea. Chemists and biochemists often work with the free energy change of a chemical reaction, instead of with the entropy change. The free energy change can be described in two equivalent ways: 1. it is T Stotal where T is the temperature and Stotal is the total entropy change 2. it is the maximum amount of work available from the reaction A reaction goes in the direction in which the free energy decreases (notice the minus sign, so that this is the direction in which the total entropy increases). So free energy is a valuable commodity, which (unlike energy) is used up whenever a spontaneous change occurs. The reason gas, oil and coal are expensive is that they (with the oxygen in the air) provide a source of free energy. The everyday word fuel means pretty much the same as the scientific term free energy. So when we talk about saving energy we are talking mainly about saving fuel, that is, free energy. Similarly, food provides our bodies with a supply of free energy. This makes biochemical reactions, such as tissue building, possible. Thus what is valuable about food is not so much the energy it releases when digested, as the free energy it supplies to drive life-maintaining reactions. Muscles use free energy deriving from food to contract, so that we can do mechanical work (lifting, running, etc). Reactions in the muscles change myosin molecules so that they bend, dragging an actin fibre sideways. These reactions again involve adenosine triphosphate. Potential energy is like free energy The potential energy of a stretched spring or a lifted weight is the work needed to stretch or lift. And all of that work can be got back when the spring relaxes or the weight falls. If a stone falls on the ground, the energy is shared out amongst many molecules of the ground and stone. The entropy increases. In this kind of case, the potential energy change is the same as the free energy change. Thus the well known idea that potential energy tends to a minimum is exactly the same idea as that of free energy always decreasing. Notice that potential energy tends to a minimum only when the energy is dissipated amongst many particles (entropy increases). By contrast, in very simple mechanical examples (a ball on a spring, a planet circling the Sun) there is negligible dissipation. Energy then passes back and forth without loss, from a potential energy store to being stored in the motion (kinetic energy).

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Energy: a Rough Guide for Teachers

The teaching problem about energy

The fundamental problem of teaching about energy at secondary level is that we want and need to talk about the role energy plays in changes, but do not have the tools to do so. Particularly, the idea that energy is conserved (first law of thermodynamics) is simply not enough to do the job. In addition, we need some ideas from the second law of thermodynamics, as described broadly above. Either entropy or free energy change would do, but neither are on offer. Is energy needed for a change to happen? The usual way round the teaching problem is to talk about the energy needed for a change to happen. And we get a strong impression from textbooks and everyday talk (not to mention examination specifications and the people who taught us science) that if something has a lot of energy it can make more happen. These are halfway-useful half-truths. Certainly if a change involves part of a system increasing in energy, that energy has to come from something else. So evaporating water molecules requires them to be pulled apart, gaining energy, and that energy can come from the thermal store of energy shared out amongst other molecules. Getting a space craft off the ground and into space requires a lot of energy, which comes from burning rocket fuel. If the energy needed isnt there, the change cant happen. Thus energy conservation (the first law) tells us what cant happen. Thats the true part of the half truth. Lifted weights, stretched springs, fast moving masses, electric currents all have or deliver energy which it may be possible to use to make a change happen. Thats because their energy is in effect all free energy, able to drive other reactions by using it up. This is therefore a fairly harmless but not quite right part of the idea of energy as the go of things. However energy conservation cant tell us which way round a change will occur. For example, the oceans contain a huge amount of thermal energy, but we cant use it to heat our homes or boil kettles. Energy only goes spontaneously from hotter to colder. Thus a hot flame is good for boiling water, because it is hot. It is the concentration of energy that matters here. Similarly, but more subtly, electrical cells and fuels, including foods, all do have the possibility to drive change in a certain direction. They do so because they have a lot of free energy: that is, they have the possibility to increase the entropy enough to balance out another part of a change in which entropy decreases (example a plant growing tissue out of carbon dioxide and water).

Despair all ye who enter here?

No, of course not.

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Energy: a Rough Guide for Teachers It is no real surprise that the world is richer and more complicated than science textbooks make it appear. And it is no surprise that it takes a lot of skill, knowledge and creativity to find good ways to explain things simply to young people.

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