The Hell Bomb by William L. Laurence

Author:William L. Laurence [Laurence, William L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, United States, Europe, General, Germany, Asia, Japan
ISBN: 9781789120394
Google: wTxODwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2018-02-27T16:00:22+00:00

V—A PRIMER OF ATOMIC ENERGY

THE material universe, the earth and everything in it, all things living and non-living, the sun and its planets, the stars and the constellations, the galaxies and the supergalaxies, the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small, manifests itself to our senses in two forms, matter and energy. We do not know, and probably never can know, how the material universe began, and whether, indeed, it ever had a beginning, but we do know that it is constantly changing and that it did not always exist in its present form We also know that in whatever form the universe may have existed, matter and energy have always been inseparable, no energy being possible without matter, and no matter without energy, each being a form of the other.

While we do not know how and when matter and energy came into being, or whether they ever had a beginning in time as we perceive it, we do know that while the relative amounts of matter and energy are constantly changing, the total amount of both, in one form or the other, always remains the same. When a plant grows, energy from the sun, in the form of heat and light, is converted into matter, so that the total weight of the plant is greater than that of the elementary material constituents, water and carbon-dioxide gas, out of which its substance is built up. When the substance of the plant is again broken up into its original constituents by burning, the residual ashes and gases weigh less than the total weight of the intact plant, the difference corresponding to the amount of matter that had been converted into energy, liberated once again in the form of heat and light.

All energy as we know it manifests itself through motion or change in the physical or chemical state of matter, or both, though these changes and motions may be so slow as to be imperceptible, As the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus perceived more than two thousand years ago, all things are in a constant state of flux, this flux being due to an everlasting conversion of matter into energy and energy into matter, everywhere over the vast stretches of the material universe, to its outermost and innermost limits, if any limits there be.

Each manifestation of energy involves either matter in motion or a change in its physical state, which we designate as physical energy; a change in the chemical constitution of matter, which we know as chemical energy; or a combination of the two. Physical energy can be converted into chemical energy and vice versa. For example, heat and light are forms of physical energy, each consisting of a definite band of waves of definite wave lengths in violent, regular, rhythmic oscillations. A mysterious mechanism in the plant, known as photosynthesis, uses tire heat and light energy from the sun to create complex substances, such as sugars, starches, and cellulose, out of simpler sub-stances, such as carbon dioxide and water, converting physical

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