Peter Atkins on energy and work

    Nature is a weak inventor of machines for efficiently turning energy into work. When a volcano erupts, practically all of its released energy dissipates. What work there is is mainly in pushing magma around.
    The rise of industrialized civilization parallels the rise of engineers and the machines they invent to channel energy into doing work. This is how Peter Atkins describes it:

Fire preceded the harnessing of fuels to achieve work. The heat of fire – the tumbling out of energy as the chaotic motion of atoms – is easy to contrive for the tumbling is unconstrained. Work is energy tamed, and requires greater sophistication to contrive. Thus, humanity stumbled easily on to fire but needed millennia to arrive at the sophistication of the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, and the jet engine.

    A Sauntering thought: Perhaps love is base, disorderly urges tamed. Insert “base disorderly urges” in place of “energy” above, and “love” in place of “work.” Base disorderly urges are easy; love requires great sophistication to make. Are churches civilization’s equivalent of the steam engine?
    (Peter Atkins is quoted from page 34 of his book, Four Laws that Drive the Universe. Oxford University Press, 2007.)
    For a brief biography of Peter Atkins, click here. For images of or relating to Peter Atkins, click here.