Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
13
G
RAND
P
ATTERNS
Energetic and Other Essentials
Constantly consider how all things such as they now are, in
time past also were, and consider that they will be the same
again. And place before thy eyes entire dramas and stages
of the same form, whatever thou hast learned from thy ex-
perience or from older history.
Marcus Aurelius (121-180), Meditations
tential prime mover is an abstraction. Energy is an intel-
lectual construct, a concept evolved by a small group of
nineteenth-century scientists in order to analyze and ex-
plain a variety of natural phenomena ranging from the
hue of arterial blood to the efficiency of mechanical
engines. They elucidated energy's permanence as well as
its changing quality and diminishing availability inherent
in all of its conversions.
Since then science has delved into myriads of energetic
phenomena (reaching all the way into the ephemeral
world of subatomic particles to the structure of galaxies),
and applied research and engineering have introduced an
astonishing variety of practical energy conversions. This
has resulted in an overwhelming wealth of particularistic
understanding, but broadly based interdisciplinary syn-
theses aimed at fairly comprehensive presentations of
general energetics, or at least of its principal constituent
parts, have been rare. This is not surprising, given the
predilection of modern science for ever more specialized
Everything in the observable universe can be seen, ana-
lyzed, and explained in energy terms. The evolution of
life on Earth has been energized by radiation streaming
from the closest star and also, in a minor but fundamen-
tal way, by the planet's internal heat. The Earth's bio-
sphere is an intricate, interactive assembly of energy
stores and flows. Life maintains itself negentropically in
constant disequilibrium with its surroundings through
incessant imports and conversions of external energies.
The development of civilization has been a quest for
higher energy throughputs transformed into larger
anthropomass and greater complexity. And yet this exis-
