Sun Power - Energy from Matter

Ever so many years ago, people thought the sun was just a huge bonfire, chemically burning fuel.  The chemical equation looked something like this

That's gasoline with oxygen in a car engine.  Complete combustion releases only carbon dioxide and water and that's why your exhaust pipe drips - it's the condensation of a reaction product, not water in the gas or rain water from the last hurricane.

But that process  won't work for the sun.  Oxygen supply is a problem.  Fuel is a problem.  The best it could do under perfect conditions is a few thousand years.  Maybe.  But it just won't work.

And we knew it.  Scientists had no idea where the energy that powered the sun came from until about 1920.  And the average person has no clue either.

Chemical processes are all about the electrons - sharing, trading, transferring, repelling.

Nuclear processes have nothing to do with electrons.  Focus on that teeny tiny part of the atom that you basically ignored in chemistry class - the nucleus.  It has almost all the mass, takes up almost no space, and is freed from its confining electrons in the plasma at the sun center.

The hydrogen nuclei (free protons), moving at unimaginably high speeds, collide with each other constantly and sometimes (rarely) combine to form larger nuclei.  This process continues in our sun until helium nuclei are formed.  The most famous equation in the world governs the energy production since matter is converted into energy.

Without quantum physics, however, even that wouldn't happen since at the fusion core of the sun, it's not hot enough to make the nuclei move fast enough to overcome the proton to proton repulsion.

So the sun ain't no "ball of fire."  It's a huge nucleosynthesizer that fuses hydrogen into helium, converts tiny bits of mass into huge amounts of energy, and keeps us toasty in summer.

Conservation Laws? Not Always True - Freaky Fzx Friday

In Chemistry and Biology you learned all about the Law of Conservation of Matter.

 

Not quite the Law of Conservation of Matter but close.  Almost the Law of Conservation of Life - Life begets life.

But even in my high school chemistry class we calculated the mass defect since particles lose mass when they form a nucleus.  This is an example of mass loss and energy release - the energy source for our stars.

The above Law of Conservation of Mass was fundamental to a good understanding of Chemistry.  Without it there would have been no chemistry.

And the Law of Conservation of Energy?  Seriously important for the development of science

The idea that gravitational potential energy and heat from friction and energy of motion and nuclear bond energy are the same thing was a great leap forward.

The problem is that those conservation laws are not strictly true.  What's the famous equation in the world?

Most people will interpret this as shown in the picture above but that's not a good translation.  This is another Einstein idea and it's all about  matter-energy equivalence.

Every time you eat or drive a car or use electricity from a coal, natural gas, or nuclear power plant - that's energy from matter.  Chemical bond energy and nuclear bond energy manifest as mass.

Electrons are NOT tiny planets - Freaky Fzx Friday

For the last two episodes of Freaky Fzx Friday we've dealt with the fact that every kind of electromagnetic wave travels as a wave and collides as a particle.  It's a tough concept but that's why microwaves and cell phones and radar guns don't cause cancer.  They don't have enough energy when colliding as particles to ionize - knock out electrons and change DNA.

"The Big Bang Theory" - fun show for adults even if they don't understand the Fzx discussed.  Funner for a Fzx expert.  But the atom shown after every commercial break is wrong.

Here's the International Atomic Energy Agency logo

and the US Nuclear Regulatory Commision

Those symbols are wrong.  The electrons aren't planets most of the time.  They collide as particles and travel as waves just like electromagnetic "waves."

So electrons don't act as particles when traveling.  They act like waves.  Electrons ARE waves.  They only collide as the particles we think they always are.

That's a tiny peak into wave particle duality and quantum physics.  Freaky.