Chapter 5 - Thermodynamics today

We should be very happy to know, or at least strongly hope, that we can make energy for our purposes from nothing using just internal force. Let us first try find out how and why we have become what we are and what we think today, before we go on to design heatless engines.

Most energy is obtained from heat. You burn something, create heat thereby, and use this heat to make something move. Such movement creates electrical power when anything that can carry current is moved before magnets. Non-heat sources of energy are also there: in hydro-electric systems you make dams, and make water fall from a height. The falling water has kinetic energy that is converted to electrical energy using generators. We also have wind energy that drive windmills, solar energy using semiconductors or energy-concentrating reflectors, and energy from tides.

The environmentalists endorse the non-heat sources, save for those hydro-electric systems that cause massive dislocation of forestry and often create human suffering. Windmills and watermills are fine, but depend upon wind and water. They are not portable! Solar energy is wonderful, but we have the sun for only half the time. In bad weather there are problems, and again, there are portability issues.

Today there appears to be no escape from energy generation from fossil fuels. And we are so energy-hungry, are we not? Poor countries trying to become rich need energy if they start using as much energy on a per-capita basis as people in rich countries do, the world would become a practically unlivable place, pollution wise. The total stock of fossil fuels is limited. There would be a mad scramble for them inevitably creating wars and much human misery.

It is a shame to waste fossil fuels in such a manner. They are noble, being remains of past life on the planet, and formed over millions of years. They should be put to far better use, to make medicines, beauty products, plastics, and many other things, for our future generations. We must not deprive them of such great assets.

The alternative to not using fossil fuels for energy is not politically pleasant. No politician in any rich country may dare to enforce austerity in energy measures upon the population. While some, say 5%, of the population in a rich country may genuinely understand the need for not polluting the planet, and not destroying its resources, the other 95% could not care less. This 95% knows too well that its present prosperity results from such profligate energy consumption. In the USA, for instance, any move to increase gas prices is met by solid public resistance.

How did the human race ever come to decide that to get work done, it must burn things? A French artillery officer, Carnot, while engaged in the boring of holes in cannon, observed much heat being generated in the process. He thought there had to be a relationship between work done and the heat generated. Indeed he was right; an Englishman named Joule found out they were directly related, and the constant that mathematically equates the work done with the heat produced as a result in known today as the Joules constant. It is a vital figure in engineering!

Prior to Carnot, heat engines already existed, as the simple steam engines designed by Newcomen and Watts, which burnt wood, or coal, to heat water. After the relationship between heat and work was established, it was found that temperature differences could be used to generate motion, that is, perform work, in a cyclical manner. The Carnot cycle relating to pressures, volumes and temperatures of heated gases expanding and cooling, and driving machinery as a result, is fundamental to all heat engines. To heat gases, we must burn fuel: wood, coal and now oil.

Even in the latest science fiction, the concept of producing energy from nothing is simply not there, so much is the hold of the conservation laws upon the popular mind. In the popular serial Star Trek, they use "dilithium" crystals for the energy requirements of their fictitious "warp engines"!

The whole modern conception of the universe is simply wrong, bound as it is by conservation laws. It is with this wrong conception that humans have been, and are, forced to fight and kill each other, for increasingly scarce resources. Bad science and bad engineering (all heat engines are examples of bad engineering) are responsible for most of our problems. Heat engines were initially derived from the thoughts and practice of murder; killing humans using artillery represented a gross misuse of human ingenuity. Their development related mainly to killing: in war they have been used in tanks, planes, ships, and missiles. Even in peace they kill ordinary people on roads many thousands people die painfully and ingloriously on roads every year because of heat engines.

It has only been comparatively recently understood that the universe is vast, practically infinite in magnitude. It is with this spirit that we should design engines as devices capable of producing unlimited energy, with a very high degree of simplicity, reliability, environmental-friendliness, scalability, versatility, cheapness and robustness.

Heat engines need oxygen to burn, so they cannot be used easily in outer space, or underwater. On land, however, they are very widely used for both constructive and destructive (cutting down rainforests, say) purposes. Nuclear engines have often been proposed for space purposes, and indeed nuclear engines are used in submarines designed to annihilate humanity. But while they do have a very long range as compared to say diesel-run submarines, they still need refuelling. They generate hazardous wastes.

The scope for engines that do not need anything other than routine maintenance to run, and keep on running, is extraordinary. Human beings may live anywhere in the vast universe where they could find water, or such matter that could create water. (The satellite of Jupiter, Europa, is covered with ice and looks like a very promising destination.) The short-term implications are also immense, and we shall investigate them after studying the design of internal force engines in some detail.

In the meantime let us just speculate about interstellar flight in romantic terms:

Forever is too short a time, beloved!

Love has winged us faster than light

Past all matter dark, and matter bright.

One moment, just one moment, gloved

First meeting, shy greeting, splendour of Spring!

Memories of joy, memories of sorrow

Ever-present hopes of better tomorrow

For children to laugh, tumble, and sing!

I would say the physicist is truly wrong

To hold time and space dimensions apart.

They unite with memory in the heart

And breathe "forever" within a single song!

Faster than one-gee we'll thrust forever

When our links with this earth will sever!