Already at the beginning of the school year, the junior high science class and I are beginning to do experiments and demonstrations. Since this year is largely physics-based (the first half of our year is “Heat and Energy”), we’ll be working a lot with the basic building blocks of mechanics—how and why things move in this universe. We began the year talking about kinds of energy.
Our most recent experiment involved two coins; each student took one of his coins and spun it on the desk, leaving the other coin flat and motionless. The question was this: which coin has energy? Certainly, the moving coin has energy (kinetic energy, to be specific), and the students were quick to deduce that. But the kicker was the fact that the motionless coin has energy too (potential energy), because it has the potential to move if it is pushed off the desk. Once that coin starts to fall, that potential energy starts being converted into moving, kinetic energy.
That conversion of energy led to an interesting question: does energy always come from other kinds of energy, or can it spring up out of nowhere? I answered that question with the well known Law of Conservation of Energy, which you may have heard before, that “energy can be neither created nor destroyed.” That’s a pretty bizarre idea, since it can often seem to us that energy just pops up out of nowhere—fire springs up out of wood, electricity comes out of batteries, coins just start moving because of some magical thing called gravity; but the Law of Conservation of Energy is true!
At least… it’s probably… mostly true. The thing about scientific laws is that they aren’t actually as trustworthy as we would expect from something called a “law.” In our class’s conversation about the Law of Conservation of Energy, I pointed out to the class that in normal life, the law holds true, but there are cases where it falls apart. For one, it doesn’t hold true in an atomic explosion; energy is actually created there. Second, energy had to be created by God at the beginning of the world. There are even experiments today which suggest that over time, energy just…goes away. As it turns out, scientific “laws” are only useful descriptions of the world that usually hold true. When it comes down to it, we can’t know for sure what’s really going on behind the scenes.
We’ll discuss this in high school Physics class too, as we talk about the motion of planets. Many scientists in the 1500s held the idea that the planets orbit the sun because of vortices of dust that swirl through space. Isaac Newton disagreed with that idea and came up with a more effective description, the mathematical idea of gravity governed by equations. Newton’s equations were held as “laws” for a long time, until Albert Einstein came up with yet another description, one that described space itself like water moving down a drain, pulling the planets in with it towards the sun—and even Einstein’s laws are questioned by many today. It’s quite remarkable that we can come up with rational laws describing the world at all. If the universe were chaotic, there’d be no way to predict what happens to a coin when it’s pushed off a desk. But thanks be to God, we have Him as the Creator who actively supports the world and holds it together by His unchanging Word. Even if our theories about the universe are incomplete, God’s constancy still allows those imperfect ideas to be useful to us. We aren’t aiming at a moving target, because our God is not chaotic. He is a God of beautiful order, and in any experiment, that beauty continues to be the greatest discovery a scientist can make.
In Christ,
Mr. Hahn
