Notes to self

This is how Richard Feynman explained the first law of thermodynamics.

Imagine a child has 28 toy wooden blocks:

Each evening, his mum collects them up and puts them back in their box. But one day, she can only find 26. She looks around, and it turns out they’re just behind the bed.

Another day there are only 15, but she looks out the window and there are the rest, on the ground.

You can always find the blocks, just as you can always find the energy from a reaction somewhere. It can’t be simply destroyed.

One day the child says to his mother ‘No! You can’t look in the box!’

How can she tell how many blocks he’s put away?  She starts to weight the box each day, and over time learns to tell how many are inside, without even looking.

And this is how it works in science. Although you can’t always directly see the energy output from a reaction or process, you know that it can’t be destroyed or lost altogether, so you can infer where it is.

Astrid Schiller, Coiffure Alexandre, Paris, 1967

Fuchsia Beach, 2015 from Field Trip