Vaclav Smil Quotes

Energy can't be destroyed, only converted into something different. So when a person dies, where does that energy go?

There is no energy in matter other than that received from the environment

In speaking of the Energy of the field, however, I wish to be understood literally. All energy is the same as mechanical energy, whether it exists in the form of motion or in that of elasticity, or in any other form. The energy in electromagnetic phenomena is mechanical energy.

The sensitive plate, the gas which is ionised, the fluorescent screen, are in reality receivers, into another kind of energy, chemical energy, ionic energy... luminous energy.

Energy is everything. Rubbing happy and sad together creates energy.

Energy is the measure of that which passes from one atom to another in the course of their transformations. A unifying power, then, but also, because the atom appears to become enriched or exhausted in the course of the exchange, the expression of structure.

It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is

Energy is the ultimate convertable currency.

Whatever is not an energy source, is an energy sink.

One of the bedrock principles of physics is the conservation of energy. In this universe, energy can be neither created nor destroyed.

We're electrical items and when we die the electricity goes somewhere else. When we die our energy goes into the galaxy.

Organisms sip energy, because they have to work or barter for every single bit that they get.

Indeed, as the above calculation indicates, to take full advantage of the memory space available, the ultimate laptop must turn all its matter into energy.

The law in question asserts, that the quantity of force which can be brought into action in the whole of Nature is unchangeable, and can neither be increased nor diminished.

Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.

…trees are made of air, primarily. When they are burned, they go back to air, and in the flaming heat is released the flaming heat of the Sun which was bound in to convert the air into tree. And in the ash is the small remnant of the part which did not come from air, that came from the solid earth, instead.

Local order in parts of the universe is always possible at the expense of heat and disorder dissipated to the external environment. The human body is one example: we take in energy from our environment to build up complex molecules that help power our bodies, and, in doing so, we release heat to the world around us.

Energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right.

Every time you look up at the sky, every one of those points of light is a reminder that fusion power is extractable from hydrogen and other light elements, and it is an everyday reality throughout the Milky Way Galaxy.

If you take a bale of hay and tie it to the tail of a mule and then strike a match and set the bale of hay on fire, and if you then compare the energy expended shortly thereafter by the mule with the energy expended by yourself in the striking of the match, you will understand the concept of amplification.

In nothingness, there is everything, energy. The ending is a beginning.

When all thermonuclear sources of energy are exhausted a sufficiently heavy star will collapse. Unless fission due to rotation, the radiation of mass, or the blowing off of mass by radiation, reduce the star's mass to the order of that of the sun, this contraction will continue indefinitely.

A lodestone is a wonderful thing in very many experiments, and like living things. And one of its remarkable virtues in that which the ancients considered to be a living soul in the sky, in the globes and in the stars, in the sun and in the moon.

One of the truths I most deeply believe is that everything in life - everything - is energy. Within every one of us is the energy that makes the sun rise every day and keeps the planets aligned. It's there, already inside of you, waiting for you to know it. And when you tap in with that connection, that source, that miraculous energy, what I know for sure is that the universe rises up to meet you in unimaginable ways and help you create the life that you want.