Coeus, meanwhile, seemed not one iota fazed by the societal implications of such a thing, as he stared intently at the tip of the nozzle. His mouth hung halfway open, and it was clear that his thoughts were currently worlds away from the sofa. It was like the face of a child who’d just been given a new set of crayons; he was imaging what wondrous things he could create with this new tool and the infinite possibilities it presented, taking his time to try all of the different colors as he slowly drew out his vision on this sketchpad called reality. Though his expression was stoic, I could tell he was thoroughly enjoying every minute of it. And so I decided I’d best make myself scarce, and left the room with the quietest of footfalls to give him some alone time with his new toy.
I gazed out from the balcony at a landscape painted in various shades of the same two colors—sky blue, ocean blue; cloud white, glacier white. Even the hazy white of my own visible breath couldn’t add another hue to the spectrum, as it quickly dissipated into the frigid air.
For the past few days, we’d been walking past nothing but tidewater glaciers and fjords as we made our way around the Gulf of Alaska. Serving as the northeastern boundary of the entire Pacific Ocean, this massive arm of the sea felt far too vast and open to be classified as a gulf. At 1,500 kilometers wide and over 1.5 million square kilometers in total surface area, it could encompass the entire Japanese archipelago four times over. This being the case, it took an awfully long time to circumnavigate, and some monotonous scenery was to be expected.
We were currently walking along the shoreline of the Kenai Fjords Natural Park. It was a publicly zoned park whose grounds consisted almost entirely of vast swaths of snow and ice, including the Harding Icefield. Here, outflowing glaciers stretched all the way down to the sea, where they discharged icebergs into the Pacific via a process called calving. What I now saw before me was just one small portion of this tidewater ice front—an endless wall of white, stretching as far as I could see along the coast.
I scanned this seaward face of the ice shelf for any hint of movement, but found none. It stood stalwart in repose, waiting patiently for nature to decide when next it should let a piece of itself crumble down into the water. Perhaps if I could get significantly closer, I’d be able to see some spots where thawing or flowing occurred, but from here on the balcony, it really did look like a landscape frozen in time.
But such was the inherent nature of ice, I suppose. Since heat was simply the resultant kinetic energy from a substance whose molecules and atoms were vibrating faster due to a rise in temperature, a decrease in temperature meant a reduction in said kinetic energy. Ice was therefore a result of water molecules having such little kinetic energy that they vibrated slow enough to take on a solid state—and if you brought the temperature down even further, those vibrations could slow almost to a stop. It should theoretically never be able to reach a complete stop, of course, but as entropy reaches its maximum value in an isolated system at equilibrium, these infinitesimal changes over time should become almost imperceptible. In a world of ice, all one really had to do to make it feel like time was standing eternally still was refrain from looking at one’s watch.
I recalled the volcanic eruption we’d seen on the Kamchatka Peninsula last month. I’d completely forgotten the name of that volcano, but I still vividly remembered the image of its column of smoke rising up as if to breach the stratosphere, and of the rivers of lava spilling out of its mouth, swallowing up everything in their way. It was an incredible explosion of thermal energy, and an impressive display of Mother Nature at work.
Does that mean this ice front is “at rest,” then?
It was a question that answered itself, really—even if the concept of nature doing work was a fairly nebulous one, anyone would agree that this barely advancing glacier was doing far less of it than a volcanic eruption. They were both functions of nature, though, so surely both had to be doing something. I was reminded of the previous discussion I had with Coeus, about how even nonliving parts of a collaborative system could be said to be “doing work,” like the vitamins and minerals in our bodies. Surely there must be some sort of commonality here…
Just then, a small section of the ice shelf I was gazing at began to move. A portion of the white cliff face peeled itself off from the glacier, and cascaded downward with a laborious pace befitting such a massive chunk of ice. While from this distance, it looked hardly the size of a snowball, the way it seemed to crash down into the sea in slow motion, sending up a massive splash of saltwater as it hit the surface, made its true size clear.
“Wait, that’s it…” I whispered, finally making the connection in my head.
It was the other type of work.
“Look, here’s what I’m talking about,” I said to Coeus as we sat together on the living room floor. Despite my earlier aversion to interrupting his little practice session, this was a necessary discussion. The two of us peered down at the same holofield, and I scribbled with my digital pen to draw out a crude diagram. It was a simple drawing of a box being moved across a surface—one I remembered seeing in a science textbook once upon a time. It was a popular explanatory diagram for a specific physics concept.
Namely, the concept of work.
“In the physics sense, work is defined as an amount of energy,” I said, pointing at each object as I explained. My memory of these things was fuzzy at this point, so I opened a second holofield with a textbook that I cross-referenced to make sure I had it right. This was purely a study session; neither one of us was the teacher here. “Specifically, the amount of energy transferred to a given object by force F in order to move it across a given distance, s. The amount of work, W, is equal to F multiplied by s.”
The product of force and displacement, yes, said Coeus. It’s a scalar quantity, represented by the unit type joules. In gravitational units, it’s represented by the kilogram-force meter, with one kilogram-force meter equal to 9.80665 joules.
Coeus supplemented my rudimentary explanation with his encyclopedic knowledge. The 9.8 figure was one I was familiar with, though—you saw it a lot in science, as it was also the constant for the acceleration of gravity near sea level.
“Right,” I said. “So in physics, I guess you could say that ‘work’ is just a way of telling you how much an object of such-and-such weight is displaced—moved, basically—by forces acting upon it.”
I tried to explain the action depicted on the diagram in the simplest language I possibly could, mostly for my own benefit. When pushing or pulling a heavy object, the heavier the object was, the more force would be required to move it—and thus the more strenuous the work would be. Furthermore, if the object remained static and was not moved whatsoever, then what you’ve done does not qualify as work, no matter how hard you might be pushing or pulling on it. There had to be some sort of change in position—that is, a displacement—for work to be achieved.
When a volcano spewed forth massive chunks of molten rock, that was a displacement. When gravity tore an iceberg off of a giant glacier, which then sent waves all around as it crashed down into the sea, those were displacements too. Both natural phenomena qualified as work, in the physics sense.
I continued reading the text on the secondary holofield. Although energy was necessary to do work on an object, that energy was still consumed even if said object didn’t budge a single millimeter. But due to the law of conservation of energy, that expended energy was not lost or destroyed—it was retained thermodynamically in the form of heat, with the sum total of work and heat comprising a system’s internal energy. This was the first law of thermodynamics.
So on the macroscopic level, heat and work were our two main forms energy could take. On the microscopic level, though, heat energy was the result of the kinetic energy of molecules vibrating faster, and each time one molecule collided with another, a small amount of work was being done. So while the specific ratio of heat-to-work varied depending on what perspective you were viewing a system from, the fundamental principle remained the same. One of humanity’s eternal Sisyphean tasks was trying to figure out how to most efficiently use the heat at our disposal to get the greatest possible amount of work done.