Food is not energy

A response to a response to my last post--NASA, food is not energy.

Language matters, especially to young children trying to make sense of the world. I remember being utterly confused as a child thinking that Karl and Groucho were the same guy--how dangerous could the Russians be if they were led by a man with a fake mustache who made silly movies?

As adults, with reasonable frames of reference, we laugh at obvious holes in our schema. The best comedians make a living at pointing out the oblivious obvious.

Children, however, will try to weave the inconsistencies into their worldview that already exists. They don't get jokes because they're so busy trying to make sense out of everything.

And they do, internally if not correctly.

As we get older, we learn that people will laugh at us if we do not share a common schema, so we learn to laugh at jokes we do not get, then wrestle quietly with the punchline, stuck in our brain like a piece of corn caught between molars.

***

We live in a Newtonian universe. Einstein was a smart guy, and his work led the way to all kinds of remarkable things, but we'll not be transforming matter into energy in our classroom, nor energy into matter.

 Matter is matter, and energy is energy.

But what about food? And plants? And sunlight?
I'll get to those in a moment.

Matter
is usually defined in public schools as something that has mass and occupies space, and we toss this at kids as though they have some special understanding of mass. 

I certainly don't, so I use a different definition my students can grasp--matter is "stuff." I can tell them it has inertia, or I can tell them that if I throw it at them fast enough they will feel it. (Yes, I know, some particles fly through us since we're mostly empty space...another story for another day.)

Energy
is usually defined in public schools as the ability to do work, and we toss this at kids as though they have some special understanding of a physicist's concept of work.

I certainly don't, so I use a different definition. Energy is some quality that can cause a change in stuff. That is, of course, a lousy definition, hardly covers all its various forms. I might say that if stuff has changed, then energy was involved, also a limited definition. 


I'd rather use crippled definitions with their defects discussed than the "real" definitions in textbooks that tell us nothing new. (Starting science units with "vocabulary" just adds to the fun.)


My students are told, upfront, that I have problems grasping the concepts of matter and energy. These are hugely difficult concepts. If you truly grasp them, you own the universe, and no one owns the universe. No one.

Stuff is stuff, and energy is energy, and in Newton's world, "never the twain shall meet."

***

NASA tells teachers that "food is energy," and it's simply not so.


I put a pie in a slingshot and fire it your way, you will feel it. It's stuff. It moved, made a sound, broke into several pieces, warmed up my face, all evidence of "energy," but the stuff is still the same stuff.

If I burn propane by mixing it with oxygen, I mix the stuff around a bit, but I will end up with exactly the same amount of stuff (defined as the measurement of force exerted by that stuff on a scale placed between it and the Earth) in the form of water and carbon dioxide. Exactly the same. For all the light and heat and noise released, the amount of stuff remains exactly the same.

(You can easily demonstrate that water comes out of this reaction--grab a propane torch and flash the flame over cool metal--use a desk leg or a faucet.)


This is a big deal. 


If kids get through their first 8 years of public school knowing nothing else besides the conservation of mass and energy, we'll take it from there.

***

So where is this thing called energy? Bad question--it is no "thing."

How is energy stored in food? Better question, but still almost impossible to answer if you do not have a reasonable grasp of chemistry, so let's leave food for a minute and go to a 5 pound rock. 

If I drop a 5 pound rock on your head, how much damage does it cause? Well, that depends on how high the rock was (relative to your head) before it was dropped. The higher the drop, the more damage done, the more energy released. We call this potential energy, a deceptively difficult concept.

If I pick up a rock, it is the exact same rock it was when it as still on the floor. It is now in a less stable position by virtue of having been lifted from the floor, but it's still the exact same rock. It can make more change now when I drop it--louder sound, more damage--but it's still the same rock before and after I drop it.

The potential energy is not "in" the rock, it's in the rock's relative position to the floor. The less stable the rock's position, the more energy it "has."

The rock got less stable because I invested kinetic energy using my muscles. My kinetic energy came from, the potential energy created by the unstable complex organic molecules we call "food"--when I exercise, I convert unstable food molecules into more stable water and carbon dioxide molecules. I need oxygen to help strip the electrons off the food molecules.

The mass of a molecule of glucose and the oxygen molecules needed to break it down need to break them down is exactly the same as the mass of the carbon dioxide and water molecules left when the energy has been released..

The potential energy "in" food came from a plant's ability to combine carbon dioxide and pieces of water together into a larger, less stable compound, using the energy of sunlight.

You cannot weigh sunlight because it's not stuff, it's energy.

Plants do not "eat" sunlight. Stuff is stuff, energy is energy. Food is not energy. It is stuff.

Plants recycle the stuff, but they cannot recycle energy. Energy goes from useful to less useful to even less useful.

And where does sunlight come from? Here's where Einstein joins the party--hydrogen atoms are fused into helium, a tiny bit of mass converted to tremendous amounts of energy.

That's fascinating and deserves study but not until later, when a child knows what food is.

Newton and the Marxes lifted from PD sources.

Potential energy diagram from McGraw-Hill here.

Fond of bonds

Les Trois Danseuses, Picasso, 1925

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

W.B. Yeats, from "Among School Children"

***

I teach biology, or try to, anyway. What I mostly teach, I think, is a way to look at the world, a way labeled "science."

Through a series of events mostly inexplicable to me, as much related to the state biology exit exam as to the retrograde motion of Mercury, my sophomores have had essentially no chemistry before coming to my class. None...

I get to expose them to chemistry. I love chemistry. To grasp chemistry, you need to grasp bonds.

Trouble is, there is nothing to grasp--in a sense, they do no exist.

***

I had a lot of trouble with the concept of potential energy when I was in high school. A teacher would lift an object, the pontificate about how this object now had "potential" energy.

Where, I wondered (and eventually learned not to ask), was the energy?

It's like trying to "see" the energy in the water at the top of a waterfall. The water itself is exactly the same at the top as it is at the bottom. I could see that a waterfall could do work, I am not stupid, but where was it before the molecules cascaded over the dam?

I was told the energy was in the object until I finally got my first real science teacher, Ms. Lehman, a wonderful woman with a wonderfully twisted view of reality (any honest view will be twisted) and the patience of Job, who explained to me that the energy was in the position. Over and over again until I got it.

Once I internalized this, I shot through chemistry and never looked back.

It is really a simple, simple idea.

***

The waterfall analogy suffers from a major flaw--rearranged atoms do form new substances. Still, you end up with exactly the same atoms that started the reaction, just scrambled up differently.)

Every time.

If you hope to get kids (or other forms of humans) to understand chemistry, they must also internalize the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy. This can take months, even years, especially if our children demand evidence. (Alas, we beat the snot out of the curious very early on in public education...)

We don't have that kind of time--so we (students, teachers, districts, states, with Arne's approval) fake it.

I suspect that's a major reason so many despise stoichiometry, a shame--stoichiometry is the Mikhail Baryshnikov (or Michael Jackson) of science, an intricate choreographer of seemingly impossible moves as energy flows through matter.

The moves of Michael Jackson do not "exist"--they represent the relative positions of pieces of Michael Jackson.

***

Many of us "teach" the photosynthesis/respiration equation this way:

C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂ ⇒ 6CO₂ + 6H₂O + energy

Kids see "energy" the same way they see everything else there, if they see it at all. Energy is hanging out there just like the other "stuff"--heck, they've been told since kindergarten that plants convert sunlight into food.

Plant do not do any such thing--they simply rearrange the stuff around into more complex, less stable forms.

We tell the more sophisticated students that plants put energy is "in" the bonds, and they nod sagely, writing  down like ancient Irish monks bent over their vellum, recopying wisdom passed down through the ages.

I'm not here to tell you the Irish copied bunk--I do not need my Granny's leathery yellowed hand breaking through the earth, grabbing my ankle. I will tell you, though, that our student do.

***

Here's what I do.

Every time I mention a reaction that requires a net input of enery to build a bigger, less stable molecule, I stack a lab stool on top of a desk. It takes exertion. When I'm done, I have the same stuff--a desk and a stool, but I have a larger, less stable object.

If I want to break it down, I still need to put in a little bit of energy to nudge the structure. This is not a trivial matter. If a few atoms are clustered together in a non-random position, there's something about that position that allows them to "stick" together. Every reaction requires breaking up that something.

We call this activation energy.

I love watching the stool cascade off the desk, loudly bouncing along the floor until it comes to rest in a more stable position. The kinetic and sound energy are obvious, the bump up in temperature where the stool collided with the floor a little less so. ( I've been know to touch the floor at the spot of impact and pretend it is hot.)

Energy released.

The stool lying sideways on the floor is pretty darn stable, and its position pretty darn strong. This may be counter-intuitive--students confound strength of bonds with the energy released as substances break down from less stable to more stable arrangements.

This is, of course, a bit of a simplification, but unlike the concept of bond as some thing betweeen atoms, it allows for growth of a more accurate model. It also makes visible the idea of potential energy as a consequence of position, of the dance, as opposed to the stuff itself, or the dancer.

The Michael Jackson photo is from Spilled Mind, without attribution.

You cannot appreciate MJ's genius from a still.

"A Framework for K-12 Science Education" released today

A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas was just released.

One of my few frustrations with teaching science at the high school level are the misconceptions kids carry up from lower grades, or from life in general.

I spend a lot of time on misconceptionectomies, but they are resistant to quick cure, particularly if reinforced in the younger grades.

It's OK to teach incomplete science in 2nd grade--it's incomplete even at the highest levels of formal education. Science will always be incomplete, a big part of its appeal. It's plain wrong, though, to teach bad science.

So I am heartened to see this:

"Clearly, incorrect beliefs—such as the perception that food or fuel is a form of energy—would lead to elementary grade students’ misunderstanding of the nature of energy. Hence, although the necessity for food or fuel can be discussed, the language of energy needs to be used with care so as not to further establish such misconceptions."

A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas

Italics added

If you teach science, go get this--it's free, and it will affect your classroom in the years to come.

Bicycles are killing the planet!

Here's a problem I've posed to my students a few times:

I like to ride my bicycle, just for the sheer joy of it. I burn a lot of calories doing it. Where does the energy come from?

Well, um, food, no?

Very good! How does the energy stored in food get converted to my feet pushing the pedals.

Longish discussion with some hair-pulling and tongue-clicking, but we eventually slosh our way through cellular respiration and oxygen and mitochondria and all the trivia you need to master to get past your sophomore year in high school.

What happens to the food? Where does it go? (If you're lost, breathe on your hand....)

Again, some trepidation, but we get there: CO2 and water?

Excellent! Every time I ride my bike to school, I'm spewing off CO2--am I contributing to global warming?

Silence. The short ("obvious") answer is yes, but my lambs have learned this much--the short "obvious" answers are rarely so.

It's a different kind of CO2?

No, I tell them, it's exactly the same...and it is.

***

John Tierney flaunted his twisted knickers in The New York Times a couple of years ago--it's a fun column to read, despite his usual smugness--but he misses a fundamental point. While CO2 is CO2 is CO2, the source of the CO2 matters.

The source of our CO2 is, of course, food, and for most of us in the States, our food uses a lot of fossil fuel to make, especially meats.

Michael Bluejay bikes. A lot. He also thinks. A lot. He's developed a Bike vs. Walk vs. Drive calculator that allows you to enter all kinds of data to find you transportation carbon footprint.

Assuming I'm a regular American, the amount of fossil fuels used for the food that fuels my biking (190# at 12 mph) matches that of our Civic: a 3 mile trip uses about 9 ounces of petroleum for either trip.

And the news for eco-fanatics gets worse--I release 20% more CO2 than my car does over the same distance!

***

The big difference, of course, is that jamming a McDonald's milkshake into the gas tank of a car will not work--cars need fossil fuels, releasing carbon dioxide that has been trapped for millions upon millions of years back into the atmosphere.

And in early summer, I'm not a regular American--when I eat homegrown tomatoes and hand-raked clams, nibbling wild cherries and mulberries, my food bill approaches 0 gallons of fossil fuels.

I bike without a care, no matter what Mr. Tierney's smugness level is.

I am an admitted tree-huggin--squirrel-kissin' ecofanatic.
I do not, however, weigh only 190 pounds--I need to lose about 14 to get there again.

I really don't like John Tierney, or anyone else who's smart enough to get it,
but would rather sell a half-truth for his own gain than seek truth .

The old bike drawing is from Victoriana.

CO2 model from Wikimedia commons--by Jacek FH

Wall Street Transparency and Accountability Act of 2010

"We have to educate our
way to a better economy."

The Scarecrow

There's seems to be a very basic confusion here, the kind of confusion that separates the wrench from the rhetoric crowd.

If Arne means the extractive economy, where access to dollars and power leads to more dollars, more power, well, the clever will win, as they have, as they will. We have as much a distribution as a production problem here in the States, and even if a degree from the Katharine Gibbs College held the gravitas of sheepskin from Yale, not all of us can run our own mutual fund company.

I agree our kids need a dose of financial literacy. I'd start by bringing in a bowl of dollar bills, buttered, salted, and fried to a nice crispiness, then ask my students to snack on them.
Dr. D, you're weird....

What do you need?

Oxygen. Water. Food. Shelter. Warmth.

Money helps fit you into the distribution system--everything listed above costs you something except oxygen, and some day that will be marketed as well.

A college degree will help you gain access to the money world--you do not need to know a blessed thing about how life works to join the fray. I got a tiny jolt of comfort learning that the Wall Street reform bill starts in the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry.

If Wall Street can be held accountable to anything, it will be the laws of nature. I'm not holding my breath--that'd be unnatural--but if the Senate cannot fix this, the limits of biomass production will.

New Jersey Environmental Federation

Miners die for our sins. That they get paid reasonably well to do this does not disconnect us from our responsibility to them. Miners' lives are cheap, so coal can remain cheap. Cheap as in dollars. Cheap as in life.

We mostly lead cheap lives. If we thought about what we do moment to moment, thought about the consequences to our neighbors, to our babies, to our babies' babies, most of us would stop. The few that wouldn't would go to jail.

Most of us don't think. Most of us. Yesterday I got to meet a hive of activists who know a bit about water and they think about what they know. Even more important, they do something vastly more useful than wringing their hands. They ring doorbells instead.

***

Yesterday I got to talk to a group of aware young adults, canvassers for the New Jersey Environmental Federation--Clean Water Action. I talked to them about clamming, which is dependent on decent water, and while clamming is one of my passions, it's not something most 20somethings spend a lot of time contemplating, but they were polite, and nobody fell asleep.


They work for us and the Earth. They are passionate, knowledgeable, and obviously happy to do the work they do. They do important work, work that matters, and they do it well.

They are not Pollyannas. They make connections. They can see where current cultural practices will lead us. And despite this, they seem, well, happy.

If someone who know a bit about water rings your doorbell, listen to them. Handing them a check for their work keeps them employed, but if you really want to see them glow, listen to what they have to say. They're passionate and knowledgeable, and they believe they can change the world.

And if we pay attention, they will.

Yep, my son is in the picture.

Hubris and the LHC

Suppose that the ultimate standard of our work were to be, not professionalism and profitability, but health and the durability of human and natural communities. Suppose we learn to ask of any proposed innovation the question ...: What will this do to our community....Suppose, in short, that we should take seriously the proposition that our arts and sciences have the power to help us adapt and survive. What then?

Well we certainly would have a healthier, prettier, more diverse and interesting world, a world less toxic and explosive, than we have now.

Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle

The scientist, a woman, is sitting in a room surrounded by monitors detailing invisible events miles away. She is smiling, so I imagine she is happy. She is happy thinking thought about things that do not exist except in her mind and on her monitors.




In her hand she holds champagne. Grapes fed the rays of the sun, lashing together carbon dioxide and water, were consumed by yeast. Electrons spilled, compounds changed. The yeast grow and divide, grow and divide, until poisoned by the same ethanol they produced.

That we can smash a couple of protons together at energies beyond comprehension, spending money beyond imagination, to search for the God particle in the name of physics speaks to our conceit.

That we celebrate such deeds while holding champagne in our hands, only dimly aware of the daily miracles that make wine, that make bread, that allow us to breathe, to drink, to eat while chasing our conceits at the expense of our neighbors speaks to our ignorance.

Michio Kaku, a physicist, writes in tomorrow's Wall Street Journal that this will help us "understand...the instant of genesis." He has said that finding new particles might "affect our conception of who we are in the universe."

Dr. Kaku speaks metaphorically, I suppose, and I reckon he'd be a fine musician of Bremen, but he does not speak for me.

Yesterday, the same Dr. Kaku said:

This is a huge step toward unraveling Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 1 -- what happened in the beginning. This is a Genesis machine. It’ll help to recreate the most glorious event in the history of the universe.

If you cannot find your "conception," your place, your existence in the life around you, you are not going to find it anywhere. Not in a book, not in a monitor, not in a 17 mile slinky toy buried beneath Europe.

The mindless pursuit of knowledge is a very dangerous game. If you're going to quote Genesis, Dr. Kaku, you'd do well to take a peek at Genesis 2:17. It is a fable, but a wise one.

Science allows us to see the world more clearly, to find patterns, to predict events. All science requires a filament attached to the natural, observable universe, a universe we cannot hope to ever fully understand, a universe not made in the image of man, a universe that may prove less forgiving than the gods we have created for our comfort.

Time for quahogs

The back bay's warming up--the quahogs are feeding again.

The sun's rays are no longer just glancing off the Earth around here--we're warming up. Algae grow, fusing carbon dioxide and water into sugars, bound by sunlight. A bed of clams lies just under Richardson Sound, a few of them tossed back by my hand last summer, eating the algae.

Eating is a religious act--we eat other creatures, other creatures feed on us. We pretend otherwise at our peril.

I teach biology--we use words like adenosine triphosphate synthase and nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide--and none of my students know how a clam grows.

Few know why we breathe.

Should I ever become a competent teacher (as opposed to the "highly qualified," tenured educator that I am), a child will grasp why our economy cannot be sustained, why declines in phytoplankton matters, why our words and abstract reduction of an incredibly complex (and ultimately incomprehensible) universe threaten our survival.

And that child would worry.

But should I become a good teacher, better than competent, a child will feel joy knowing she is part of the mystery, and she will act in good faith and good conscience to change what she can, and dance and breathe and sing and eat and live until she dies, knowing as she lives that she will die.

***

The crocuses are blooming again. The clams are rising again. The sun is climbing the sky again. I'm in my 6th decade.

Time to get the clam rake out. Again.

"I am a molecule, I cannot stop moving...."

Early in the year, I introduced a very simplified version of the kinetic theory, itself a simple (but powerful) idea. Something happened about 14 billion years ago, give or take a billion, and things have been moving ever since.

This past week we've been working on diffusion.

I get my kids up into a corner, then tell them to pick a direction, walk in that direction until they hit something, then ricochet as though you were a billiard ball.

After a few moments, I ask them to stop and note their positions. I tie their motion to the "Whoever Smelt It, Dealt It" hypothesis of fart diffusion--silly but effective--then ask them to keep moving again. The students are interspersed throughout the room, but two critical ideas emerge:

1) They are not evenly dispersed, and
2) Their positions keep changing even when they are at equilibrium. (Equilibrium is a dynamic state--true equilibrium, in the sense that every part of a system has the same concentration of particles, does not hold in tiny volumes.)

I have a box of balls--yellow on one side, black on the other, with a free agent blue ball (yes, sophomores giggle at "blue ball") randomly tossed in the mix. I shake them up until the blacks and yellow balls are reasonably interspersed.

"Will this arrangement of balls ever happen again if I keep shaking the box?"
Most say no.
"Is this arrangement possible?"

Well, yeah, Dr. D, duh--it just happened.

"Will this arrangement of balls ever happen again."

It could, maybe...

"Will it?"

Most think not, and I agree with them. I think. Playing with an infinite number of possible arrangements over an infinite number of trials scrambles the mind.

A child muttered in class this week that she keeps knowing less than she thought she knew.

Success.

I stole this exercise from Ms. Rinaldi here at BHS--I steal from a lot of folks.

Leslie makes a good point--Michael Franti rocks!

The Choice

The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story's finished, what's the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.

W.B.Yeats

We just came back from overseas in a matter of hours, hurtling in an aluminum cocoon. It is easy to wax philosophical when staring at the Earth several miles below.

If you do not know all that grows within a yard or two from where you are sitting, and none of us do, then contemplating "life" while staring out a window 6 miles over the Earth is a mere conceit. Ireland does not exist in the sky.

Leslie and I walked a couple dozen miles on Inis Mór, part of the Aran Islands in the Galway Bay off Ireland. Each step was different. Each of hers was different from each of mine.

Walking in the the late blue dusk not long before midnight, surrounded by stone walls built by men long dead, the air thick with a blend of sea mist and pollen, we watched a black slug generate from the shadows, its presence daring us to mention Darwin.

I am, mostly, rational, and being rational, will let go of it when it is no longer useful. I am not going to pretend I heard crows talk, but if I had, I would not have been surprised. (And if I had, I would not mention it here.)

I teach science. I love science. I do not, however, idolize science. A choice.

Walking through the west of Ireland through muddy fields holding the kin of animals we ate for breakfast, under barbed wire and over electrified fence, stepping over (and occasionally into) shite, edging along cliff edges, the crashing breakers below called me like Sirens. A choice.

Ireland is an old country. The mist rolled off the hills a thousand years ago, and will a thousand years from now. Someone else saw it then, someone else will see it later. The Irish and their land tell the story again and again, in many forms. We are mortal, we make choices. The Irish know what bad choices may bring.

Poets and painters, musicians and priests, story-tellers all, producing nothing more than the black slug emerging in the Irish summer night, when measured by the rational.

When all that story's finished, what's the news?

Rationality is a tool, an effective but jealous one; we present it to our children as something sacred, and I suppose it is. That is not our mistake.

Our mistake is ignoring the other side--the lure of the cliffs, the stories of the dead, lives worth living that do not contribute to the gross domestic product.

The black slug serves a purpose, as we all do--
it eats pretty much anything in its path, including shite.
It's useful even without knowing a lick of advanced algebra.


The photo of the slug is by Paul J. Morris found at the Encyclopedia of Life, released under CC license.

Barnacle philosophy

I found the largest barnacle I have ever seen while meandering along the bay's edge yesterday.

The barnacle has not been dead long--the sweet decay of death announces its presence. It still has enough spirit left to talk to me. And it does.

I was alive yesterday, I am not alive today.

My neighbor died last week. A friend of mine's father is very ill this week.
All living things die. All.

I forget this.
Half of my clan has died, and still I forget this.
The monitor lets me believe I am immortal.

***

Darwin studied barnacles, thousands and thousands of them. I have barely studied one, and a not-so-alive one. (I did spend a lot of time when I was younger watching barnacles sweep their feathers in the water, mesmerized by their rhythm.)

In one day I have learned about the life history of acorn barnacles, that it can see in its early stages, that at its cyprid larval stage it sniffs out adult barnacles, then touches them, then attaches its small body next to adults. It flips upside down, then forms the walls around itself, the walls so familiar to anyone who has scraped the bottom of a boat. I learned this all on the internet.

My barnacle friend sits on this desk, next to this monitor. I sniff it again. My nose teaches me what my eyes cannot.

My nose knows death.

***

And why do barnacles need to live so close each other? Why do young barnacles smell and feel other barnacles before settling down for their lifetime on a rock in Cape May?

Barnacles are intimate with each other. Unlike clams and oysters and striped bass and so many other creatures ecstatically tossing gametes into the sea, barnacles, um, have relations.

With each other.

Yes, their anatomy reflects this--take a peek below if you're insatiably curious.

***

My barnacle lived a good life--I found him on a plastic pipe that had been tossed on the beach by a recent tide. He had company, and I suspect they had relations. Empty wine glasses, burned candle stumps. I knocked off his carcass with my foot, and he will likely stay in my home until someone cremates me.

He will sit on the windowsill with the shells of oysters and clams and urchins and horseshoe crabs and whelks and mussels. I hope that someday they all get tossed back into the sea. I hope I get tossed back into the sea with them.

***

Dancing only makes sense if you're going to die. Dancing costs energy. We do it anyway.

I sniff my barnacle again. I smell the organic molecules breaking down, food for bacteria, energy caught but never used by the barnacle.

In our cultural drive to be more productive, more efficient, more more, the barnacle's rhythmic dance on the rocks reminds me that my children are not their test scores, and that what I teach matters, even the stuff not on the tests.

Darwin suffered losses while he studied the barnacles. He was plagued by illness, and lost his favorite child Annie. Somehow he got through it, and wrote The Origin of Species, an epic work that summed up a life.

I'd like to think the barnacles helped him get through the darkness.

If you want to see a wonderful video of barnacles in action (and beware, men, you may develop penis envy), click here.

Mitochondrion

Part 2 of the last post.
I may have posted this already.

In 6th grade, you labeled your cell diagram, not quite understanding what you were doing, but enjoying picking the colors from your box of crayons, coloring the pill-shaped organelle a Crayola cadet blue.

In 8th grade, you learned that the mitochondrion was where oxidation and the Krebs cycle took place (even though oxidation and Krebs were just sounds to memorize to please the teacher). You learned that this was the cell's power plant. You imagined a tiny engine burning gasoline.

In high school you memorized the Krebs cycle, took the Biology AP Exam, and managed to slip into a decent college. You slogged through biochemistry, and eventually became a pharmacist.

***

Mitochondria reside in our cells--they are sort of us, but not really--they carry their own DNA, and they descend from other mitochondria carried by your mother. And her mother. And her mother's mother.

Coloring them was about as exciting as mitochondria ever got.

***

Three decades ago I sat in the auditorium of the American Museum of Natural History. The teacher had primed our class, so when the serious man on stage asked what energy was, I knew the right words to say.

I raised my hand.
I started to open my mouth--I knew the words, my teacher was already smiling.

I did not say them. I stared at my feet.
"The ability to do work" caught in my craw.
The words explained nothing to me, and still do not.

My teacher's disappointment was once enough motivation for me to answer a stranger's question, even if I did not understand my own words.

At least until 6th grade.

***

Oxygen combines with fuel to release energy--light and heat. The oxygen does not contribute to the energy released--it "simply" accepts electrons, allowing bonds to break and reform.

If this happens fast, you get fire. Oxygen grabs electrons and protons, forming water. Hold your hand over a barbecue--the moisture on your palm is not just sweat. Hold a glass beaker over an open flame--water condenses on the cool glass. Try it.

Oxidation can happen slowly, too. The rusting rims of your child's bicycle left out over winter warms the frigid air as metallic iron morphs into ferric oxide. Rust releases heat. Molecules vibrate more quickly as electrons shift.

I know the words, but still do not trust them.

In 1978 I shoveled iron turnings on the docks, my feet warming up despite thick work boots. Until then I did not believe that rusting iron releases heat. Even more important, I had no reason to believe it--I no longer trusted teachers.

My favorite students are those who do not trust my words now--"show me!"
And I do.

***

The warmth and movement of your lover comes from the sun.
You twist together, heat and motion.
Mitochondria hum.

***

In the morning, the sun rises, as it has, as it will.

The apple I eat courses through my veins as sugar, sugar that feeds the mitochondria.

Heat, water, and carbon dioxide are released. I step outside into the New Year chill, and see my breath. The water vapor dissipates, to return as rain. The carbon dioxide eventually feeds the spring garden, a few molecules going back to the apple tree, where the sun's energy restores a bit of order.

Leslie and I make up our shared bed, laughing at the entropic knot of sheets and blankets.

Our body heat comes from our mitochondria, trillions of symbionts stoking our fires.

If the soul resides anywhere, it resides here in the mitochondria.
After our last agonal gasp, our corpse quickly cools. The change is startling, even to experienced hands.

I've pronounced a lot of dead people, feeling for a pulse, watching for chest movement. Either can fool you. The abrupt onset of cold, however, tells the story. The mitochondria have stopped working.

You are dead.

***

The best parts of science get buried in the details.

Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide.

Adenosine triphosphate.

Alpha-ketoglutarate pathway.

My students yawn at the details.

I try to use a 3D model. Nitrogen atoms are, alas, painted blue.
"The red balls are oxygen, the blue balls...."

My frontal lobe edits too slowly today. I have their attention now--"Blue balls, he said blue balls!"--and the room now vibrates with a different kind of heat.

***

I breathe. I eat.
I use the energy released from the food I eat today to start preparing for the spring garden.

A garden is a lovely lie--a pretense of order in the midst of organic chaos.

I teach about the Krebs cycle in a classroom without windows.
I want to stop class, run outside, show my lambs the inexplicable dance outside, where a tiny portion of sunlight happens to hit our world, and carbon dioxide and water happen to get reorganized into food, that we happen to eat, to be.

Grace. Dharma. Science.

Rubisco

Light a candle.

May apple orchard blossoms fed by the energy of sunlight caught by the tree's leaves beckon to honey bees. Apple trees are sexual beings. Offering nectar, their sticky stigmas wait under the warm spring sun for the brush of pollen.

The bees collect nectar, and make honey. In the second week of a bee's life, she eats lots of honey, which she converts to wax through special glands under her belly; her belly exudes wax scales, which other bees then harvest for the hive.

The bees chew the wax and shape it to form the honeycomb; they use hexagonal tubes to store the honey, getting the most volume for the least amount of wax. Ask a mathematician to come up with a more efficient shape.

In the olden days, kids chewed on honeycombs. 'Course, in the olden days, most kids were breastfed, too. Now it's Enfamil and Bazooka Joe.


Light a candle.

Forests of plankton caught sunlight millions and millions of years ago. The plankton sank and was buried. Under increasing pressure and temperature, the bonds of life transform into hydrocarbons we burn today.

A few miles from here, petroleum is cracked in refineries--gasoline, oils, and paraffin all come from the same rich crude. Travel through the northern corridor of the New Jersey Turnpike and you can see the cracking towers lighting the sky, flames licking over a puzzle of giant pipelines and huge tanks.

Most candles today are made from paraffin.

---

Just about every school child knows that plants capture sunlight and carbon dioxide to form "stuff": our food, our heat, our homes, our air all depend on photosynthesis. Carbon dioxide and water fueled by the energy of the sun form carbohydrates and release oxygen.

Chlorophyll gets all the glory--it captures the energy of photons, lassoing excited electrons like roping calves as they bounce from chlorophyll molecule to chlorophyll molecule, finally calmed down enough to be converted into chemical energy.

Still, after all is said and done, the light reaction leaves us with just ATP and NADPH--enough to keep you going if you're a bacterium, but nothing you'd serve at Christmas dinner.

---

Credit Melvin Calvin for figuring out the cycle of reactions that fix carbon dioxide to organic compounds during photosynthesis. It's how an acorn can turn into a massive tree without "using up" soil.

The critical step is grabbing hold of a carbon dioxide molecule (relatively rare in our air, despite its starring role in global warming) and plying it into existing organic compounds, creating high energy hydrocarbon bonds that make the existence of humans possible.

At the heart of the process is an ancient enzyme rubisco. Some enzymes can catalyze millions of reactions per second.

Not rubisco--it churns out new molecules at the parkinsonian rate of 3 reactions per second.

Most enzymes are amazingly picky; each enzyme reacts only with very specific molecules.

Not rubisco--it gets confused. Oh, it mostly gets things right, grabbing a carbon dioxide molecule to fix to a carbon chain, but now and again it grabs oxygen instead. Oh, well.

It's an old, old enzyme. It's an inefficient enzyme. It's an unevolved enzyme.

It's also the most abundant protein on this planet.

Mr. Clam visits my mitochondria

Success!

I am now breathing out carbon dioxide, made from atoms that were once part of Mr. Clam and his clammy buddies, who kindly provided me with the energy to keep my heart beating, my limbs moving, and my fingers typing.

(For the kiddies out there, "typing" is what we used to call keyboarding.)

Of course, Mr. Clam got his energy from tiny critters and pieces of other critters that got their energy from other critters, or pieces of critters.


Where did they get their energy from?

Algae and green plants and protists clever enough to make their own food.

Where did that energy come from?

Sunlight--caught by pigments in algae and green plants and clever protists.

And how does the sun throw off so much energy?

Protons colliding in our nearest star, hydrogen banging against hydrogen, then banging against hydrogen again. Four protons converted to a nucleus of helium (two protons, two neutrons).

4 protons weigh a tiny bit less than 2 protons and 2 neutrons, no matter what your elementary school teacher said. And that tiny bit of matter had to go somewhere.

Where did the matter go?

Turns out Einstein was right (as far as he went, anyway):

E=mc<sup>2

Matter and energy are different versions of the same stuff.</sup>

Where did that matter come from?

Go ask your local physicist, priest, or street pharmacist. It's all a mystery to me.

Some things are unanswerable, or rather unknowable. Plenty of charlatans with plenty of answers.

If you want to know the answers to the mystery, ask a clam.

Pictures taken by Leslie, who now wants to get her own clamming license so she can join in the fun. The gentleman in the bottom photo is Bob. We both have licenses, all our clams were bigger than 1 1/2", and we finished before sunset.

I found my clam bed!

Two weeks ago I slipped an aged gentleman at the Villas Fishing Club in Cape May a generous tip. He had poured me a beer, and even more important, he had told me where I might find clams.

A few moments before, my uncle and I had slinked in, stinking of Delaware Bay mud. One of us had mentioned where we were clamming. It was somewhere along the Delaware Bay. 'Nuff said.

Folks at the bar laughed so hard I started looking for a defibrillator.

My guess is most of you have never been in the Villas Fishing Club. You have to be male to be a member. Wives are welcome, too. Even after their husbands die. That more women are belly up to the bar than men reflects two things:

1) Men die earlier than women--not even close.
2) The Villas Fishing Club reflects a dying era.

Still, you can get a decent pilsner for less than the cost of a half gallon of gasoline, and you can walk in covered in the black mud of the bay, and folks will still talk to you.

Once folks stopped laughing (and their hearts restored to normal with an effective defibrillator), Randy the Bartender took pity on us. Randy used to be a clammer.

Go to Garwood Avenue in West Wildwood. Drive to the end. There's an abandoned railroad bridge. Anything south of the bridge is legal

But if you really want clams, go to the Lobster House and buy them.

More laughter.

Two weeks ago, Don't-Call-Me-Uncle Bob and I went to the spot--the tide was high, and we could not make our way around the abandoned railroad bridge.

One week ago, we made our way to the bridge at low tide, but it was 6:30 AM, and it was illegal to walk on the beach until 8:00 AM. (Yes, we can fight it, no we didn't, mortality forces you to pick your battles.)

Today, Leslie and I paddled our way out past the bridge. We saw a couple of gentleman raking the low tide mud.

Any quahogs?

Plenty!

I don't want to steal yours.

There's enough for everybody!

I dragged my fingers along the mud of Richardson Sound--a clam. Then another. And yet still another. All in 5 minutes. One was at least 11 years old. You can count the rings. I was 38 years old when the critter settled in the mud. I chucked it back.

Next week Uncle (Don't-Call-Me-Uncle) Bob and I are going out to get us a mess of clams. Then we are going to eat them.

Low tide is around 6:00 PM. It's going to be fairly dark.

Still, we're past the autumnal equinox, both of us.

Life is all about grabbing some energy.

What does this have to do with teaching? Well, this week I am talking about grabbing energy. I lit a candle at the beginning of biology class. Where did the energy come from?

Plants. Millions upon millions of years ago plants capture some energy from the sun. Some refinery just down the road (this is Jersey, after all) cracked some crude and sold some paraffin. And now we released it, as light, as heat.

The clam in the picture spent a few years filtering plankton. Eating. Grabbing energy.

And that's as cool as it gets in class.