The first discovery was a step toward answering the age-old question: How did all that we see appear?
A sheet of paper was originally part of a tree. Trees come from seeds, soil, water, air and sunlight. Soil is a mixture of small grains of sand and organic matter. The organic matter and seeds came from previous trees. Which came first, the acorn or the oak? What is the origin of minerals, water, and air? Also, where does the sunlight fit in?
Pre-scientific people may have thought that processes like biological growth create material like wood, and that other processes like burning destroy material. In the 18th and 19th centuries chemists began to keep careful track of the weight of materials that enter and leave a reaction. They proved that the total input weight is always equal to the total output weight. From this they concluded that material or matter is neither created nor destroyed in any chemical reaction, but only transformed from one kind to another. “Matter is conserved,” they said.
Heat dissipates some of the energy of movement. For instance, it makes a ball stop bouncing. James Prescott Joule (English physicist, 1818–1889) did many experiments that established the equivalence between heat and the energy of movement. One watt-second is one joule, an energy unit named in his honor. Recognizing heat as a form of energy completed the balance sheet for many kinds of energy transformations. Physicists and engineers also had a conservation law. “Energy can’t be created or destroyed,” they said.
Heat dissipates some of the energy of movement. For instance, it makes a ball stop bouncing. James Prescott Joule (English physicist, 1818–1889) did many experiments that established the equivalence between heat and the energy of movement. One watt-second is one joule, an energy unit named in his honor. Recognizing heat as a form of energy completed the balance sheet for many kinds of energy transformations. Physicists and engineers also had a conservation law. “Energy can’t be created or destroyed,” they said.
The two conservation laws come together on the subject of combustion. Fire is a chemical reaction that produces heat and light. Observation without instruments easily leads to the idea that fire destroys material and changes it into energy. Firewood is heavy. Ashes weigh much less than firewood but they still fall to the bottom of the fire pit as the flames shoot upwards. However, chemists using delicate balances showed that fire does not change the total mass of material. They trapped and weighed the gases that enter and come from the burning. The weight of the firewood and the oxygen consumed is equal to the weight of the ashes and the smoke, but what about the energy? Doesn’t it weigh anything? Is firelight just the sunlight the leaves absorbed and the wood stored somehow?
These two laws led to great progress in chemistry and physics. But if they apply at all times then the universe did not begin, nor will it end, though the Bible teaches otherwise. Do the conservation laws apply to the universe as a whole? What is the origin of matter and energy?
