Triumph of Reason: Conservation
  by Groff Schroeder

There is no such thing as a free lunch. Most people instinctively know this, even as we expect our free lunches - complete with cake that we can have and eat, too.

The scientific method is a confirmable, repeatable process through which humans propose, test, verify and correctly predict the behavior of the natural world. Propositions called hypotheses undergo formalized experiments that provide results published in journals. Rival scientists often compete exuberantly, attempting to invalidate opposing hypotheses.

Experimentation, competition and debate might go on for 100 years or more before a hypothesis becomes a theory. It might take another 100 years or so of verification before the theory becomes a law. While scientific law allows you to predict the future and be almost 100% certain the prediction will be correct, in the 500 odd year history of the scientific method, few of its laws have held as strongly as the Laws of Conservation.

Conservation of Mass: mass may be neither created nor destroyed, only transformed from one form of mass into another. Mass is conserved in everything from simple chemical reactions to nuclear chain reactions. When burning a certain amount of fuel (such as a lunch), you can trace every molecule, atom and electron, accurately and precisely predicting the composition, percent and weight of every molecule of the combustion products.

Conservation of Energy: energy may be neither created nor destroyed, only transformed from one form of energy into another. Conservation of energy means that when you burn a fuel, all of the energy present in the fuel goes somewhere. You can trace every Joule, and in all of recorded science, no repeatable experiment has shown that you can end up with more (or less) energy than you started with.

Conservation of mass and energy mean that a lunch (or any other form of matter or energy) will not magically appear, let alone be free. Somebody somewhere must make and pay for the lunch, and once eaten, it is gone with the cake.

When you burn gasoline in your car, temperatures in the range of 1400 degrees F (950 C) develop in your engine, with the released heat entering the air through your radiator. For each 6 pounds of gasoline burned (one gallon), combustion forms about 28 pounds of gaseous pollutants as the atoms of the gasoline recombine with the atoms of the air, releasing the energy stored in the chemical bonds of gasoline molecules.

The heat does not magically disappear. The atoms do not magically disappear. Even when your car is idling, countless molecules of gasoline combust into pollutant molecules every second, which pour from the exhaust pipe into the atmosphere at about 700 degrees F. These pollutants are part of the cost of our fossil fuel free lunch. We get the cake part when we burn a gallon of gas in less than an hour as we drive - inefficiently releasing energy stored in irreplaceable fuel molecules by millions of years of geologic pressure and temperature.

Any lunch and the energy and matter that made it have to come from somewhere and you simply cannot obtain a free lunch without violating the Laws of Conservation - same thing for that cake. The car simply will not start without fuel; and all those hot pollutants? Because of conservation laws, we know that they must heat the atmosphere.

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