Chapter the Fourth

No Progress

For many days now the three scientists had washed wine bottles, made broth, added the seaweed mucilage, sterilized the mixture and solidified it into slants inside the bottles. Then, day after day they had tested a variety of ways to kill the bacteria in the wine, diluted their test samples and placed small drops on the surface of the solid broth. Every evening they would return from their other duties, excitedly collect the bottles from the racks, and look to see if the colonies of bacteria had grown. Failure of the bacteria to grow would mean success of their experiment.

"Well that was a total waste of time," Brother Matthew growled, not even bothering to check the remaining bottles. Instead, he picked up a bottle of fresh, uncontaminated and very drinkable Moravian red wine, and looked for a corkscrew. It was lying on the top of the stove, and as he picked it up he burned his fingers. With an obscure Czech rural curse he dropped the corkscrew and put his fingers in his mouth.

"How many Horko of energy was that?" Brother Joseph asked, trying to lighten the tension that had been building between the friends.
"Agggh, that hurt!" exclaimed Klacel, shaking his burnt hand and putting down the wine while he looked for the glowing corkscrew. When he found it he held his hand close and felt the warmth of the still hot metal.
"You have just been the victim of thermodynamics," said Brother Joseph. He felt the need of a break in their work and wanted to talk science.
"Eh?" grunted Brother Matthew, picking up the hot corkscrew with a rag.
"Thermodynamics, the study of the movement of heat, from a Latin word meaning -'motion of heat'. It is a new branch of science just started a few years ago by Herr Doktor Sadi Carnot when he analyzed the British steam engines."
"Actually," Brother Gregory butted in, "Carnot's analysis of expansion and contraction of ideal gasses was only part of the story. William Thomson later published a valuable extension of Carnot's ideas in which he built on Joule's relationship between work and heat."

"Wait, wait!" Klacel shouted in despair, "slow down. Are we talking about heat, energy and work again? If so, you had better be prepared to explain to me why my fingers just got burned."
"Think about it," Brother Gregory said, putting down his pen and picking up a glass. "Heat moves. The stored energy moved out of the wood as kinetic energy, as heat it moved into the stove, into the corkscrew and then finally into your hand. Even now, heat continues to move out of the corkscrew and into the surrounding air. Eventually, however, the wood ash, the stove, the corkscrew and the air will all be the same temperature again, but the heat will have been redistributed."

"So heat flows like a liquid," Klacel said, testing to see if the corkscrew had cooled.
"So it was once thought," Brother Gregory said, "Heat was assumed to be a sort of fluid and was called caloric. The great scientists Lavoisier and Laplace thought that caloric behaved like water, and flowed from one region to another. Think of a hot stove as a water jar high up on a shelf. If you open the stopcock the water will flow out of the jar onto the floor or into a cup you are holding underneath. Water always flows from high places to low places. So does heat. - Heat always flows spontaneously from hot regions to cold regions."

By now the corkscrew had lost enough heat into the air that Klacel could hold it and use it to open the wine, which he poured into the glass that Mendel was still holding. "So the stove is a region. like the water jar on the shelf, of high heat and this caloric flows out of the stove like water out of the jar," he said, pouring himself a glass and taking a sip.
"It appears to be a universal law," Mendel went on, "that heat, or energy, always moves from places where it is stored in high amounts to regions where there is less. No one has ever found a situation where heat moves from a cold region into a region that is already hot. Water never flows uphill and heat never moves from a cold place into a hot place."

"Before he died, Carnot used this "law" to analyze what is going on with energy in a steam engine, where energy in wood is used to make steam which in turn does the work of turning wheels or moving levers," Brother Joseph picked up the story. "He thought that heat, like water, could be used to do useful work. He pictured a waterwheel where the flow of water over the wheel caused it to turn and hence do work. Similarly the flow of heat in the steam engine caused the wheels and levers to turn. It was a clever analysis, but too limited in its application."

"Why is that?" Brother Matthew asked.
"Because his analysis only applied to heat and to steam engines," said Brother Joseph. "Just fifteen years ago, Herr Rudolf Clausius was able to show that not just heat, but all forms of energy obey this "law". In fact some are now calling it the - Second Law of Thermodynamics. According to Clausius, in what ever form the energy exists, work can only be done if there is a source of rich energy in one part of the system and a second region that is poor in energy. Energy will flow from the 'rich' region to the 'poor' region and do the work, like turning the wheels."

"Which explains why you burned your fingers," Brother Gregory said. "The stick of wood in the stove is rich or high in potential energy. According to Lavoisier and Priestly, when that wood burns in air something it in combines with oxygen in a chemical reaction. During that process the potential energy is converted into kinetic energy, which flows, as heat into the metal of the stove and into anything on the stove. In your case it heated up the cold corkscrew. If you had not touched it, the corkscrew and the stove would have eventually cooled down as the heat continued to move into colder regions, such as the surrounding air."

"When I touched the corkscrew, some of that heat flowed into me," Brother Matthew said, "and it hurt!"
"But you too will eventually cool down," laughed Brother Joseph.
"Not while I'm alive, I hope," Klacel told him with a grin, then the grin froze on his face. "But ..." he struggled for an idea, "... but, my body is always warmer than the air, how can that be?"
"I'm not sure," Mendel said, thoughtfully, "but if Clausius is right and the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to all systems, then it must apply to us and to our bodies. Like the stove, we must be burning fuel inside, and the energy that is being released is doing the work of moving our muscles, and also being converted into heat."
"When you die, you get cold. The fires have gone out," Klacel said, soberly.

"But while we are alive," said Brother Joseph, "our bodies must be acting like a steam engine producing work and heat from fuel - in our case food."
"So, - the laws of thermodynamics are at work within biological systems, just as they are at work within mechanical systems?" Brother Matthew said, and all three of them silently considered, for a moment, the implications of that statement.
"Let's not tell Prior Sembera that," said Brother Gregory.
"Humm," said Klacel, "perhaps you are right, he wouldn't like that. But what about these yeast cells in Druer's wine? If they are alive, they are also obeying the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Is there any way we could use that fact?"

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Note: For those following the science of thermodynamics, 'biological energy', has a major link from this page.