A RULE OF LIFE…..Rene Descartes

My third maxim was to endeavour always to conquer myself rather than fortune, and to change my desires rather than the order of the world, and in general to bring myself to believe that there is nothing wholly in our power except our thoughts. And I believe that herein lay the secret of those philosophers who, in the days of old, could withdraw from the domination of fortune and, despite pain and poverty, challenge the felicity of their gods.
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so deep was my content in discovering every day by its means truths which seemed to me important, yet were unknown to the world.

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For nine years, therefore, I went up and down the world a spectator rather than an actor. These nine years slipped away before I had begun to seek for the foundations of any philosophy more certain, nor perhaps should I have dared to undertake the quest had it not been put about that I had already succeeded

More on definitions of energy

It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy “is.” We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount. It is not that way. It is an abstract thing in that it does not tell us the mechanism or the reason for the various formulas.

http://www.phy.davidson.edu/FacHome/swp/courses/PHY110/Feynman.html

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Source: Thermodynamics, by Virgil Moring Faires, and Clifford Max Simmang, MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc. (a college text book)Quote: “Energy is inherent in all matter. Energy is something that appears in many different forms which are related to each other by the fact that conversion can be made from one form of energy to another (comment from DW – see my pages on Energy Changes and the First Law of Thermodynamics). Although no simple definition can be given to the general term energy, E, except that it is the capacity to produce an effect (comment from DW – “Hey that’s like my definition!”), the various forms in which it appears can be defined with precision.”

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Source: (A good ol’ Schaum’s Outline for gosh sakes!) Theory and Problems of Thermodynamics, by M.M. Abbott, H.C. Van Ness, Schaum’s Outline Series in Engineering, McGraw-Hill Book Company
 

Quote: “Energy is a mathematical abstraction that has no existence apart from its functional relationship to other variables or coordinates that do have a physical interpretation and which can be measured. For example, the kinetic energy of a given mass of material is a function of its velocity, and it has no other reality.”
(comment from DW – Phew! I guess that’s kind of a mystic thing going there. And that’s the first paragraph! How many people would keep reading after that? Well, me for one. I couldn’t resist, here’s the next paragraph:)
More Quote (2nd paragraph in book): “The first law of thermodynamics is merely a formal statement asserting that energy is conserved. Thus it represents a primitive statement about a primitive concept. Moreover, energy and the first law are coupled: The first law depends on the concept of energy, but it is equally true that energy is an essential thermodynamic function precisely because it allows formulation of the first law.”

Bullshit in The Guardian – why aliens haven’t found us yet

It ranks among the most enduring mysteries of the cosmos. Physicists call it the Fermi paradox after the Italian Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, who, in 1950, pointed out the glaring conflict between predictions that life was elsewhere in the universe – and the conspicuous lack of aliens who have come to visit.Now a Danish researcher believes he may have solved the paradox. Extra-terrestrials have yet to find us because they haven’t had enough time to look.

Using a computer simulation of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, Rasmus Bjork, a physicist at the Niels Bohr institute in Copenhagen, proposed that a single civilisation might build eight intergalactic probes and launch them on missions to search for life. Once on their way each probe would send out eight more mini-probes, which would head for the nearest stars and look for habitable planets.

Mr Bjork confined the probes to search only solar systems in what is called the “galactic habitable zone” of the Milky Way, where solar systems are close enough to the centre to have the right elements necessary to form rocky, life-sustaining planets, but are far enough out to avoid being struck by asteroids, seared by stars or frazzled by bursts of radiation.

He found that even if the alien ships could hurtle through space at a tenth of the speed of light, or 30,000km a second, – Nasa’s current Cassini mission to Saturn is plodding along at 32km a second – it would take 10bn years, roughly half the age of the universe, to explore just 4% of the galaxy. His study is reported in New Scientist today.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1993006,00.html

Conservation of energy ( its not a mechanism??)

During a 1961 lecture for undergraduate students at the California Institute of Technology, Richard Feynman, a celebrated physics teacher and a Nobel Laureate, said this about the concept of energy:

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There is a fact, or if you wish, a law, governing natural phenomena that are known to date. There is no known exception to this law—it is exact so far we know. The law is called conservation of energy [it states that there is a certain quantity, which we call energy that does not change in manifold changes which nature undergoes]. That is a most abstract idea, because it is a mathematical principle; it says that there is a numerical quantity, which does not change when something happens. It is not a description of a mechanism, or anything concrete; it is just a strange fact that we can calculate some number, and when we finish watching nature go through her tricks and calculate the number again, it is the same.