Activation Energy for A falling Book and for Sugar : 無料・フリー素材/写真
Activation Energy for A falling Book and for Sugar / tdowd1982
| ライセンス | クリエイティブ・コモンズ 表示-継承 2.1 |
|---|---|
| 説明 | Why doesn't the book on the left spontaneously turn into the book on the right? We know it balances because we've supported the center of gravity with a support base. But the book on the left has a higher potential energy than the book on the right. Energy would be released if it fell. The reason it doesn't is that the transition state, the book in the middle, has a higher cg than the starting state. We have to add energy to get through this barrier. One needs to supply enough energy to make this transition state happen. This could be by thumping the desk, or blowing on it, or waiting until the Great Earthquake of 2023. Once the transition state has been reached, the book can either fall back to the starting position or down to the final position.This is why potential energy containing molecules can exist in nature. Sugar is made up of Carbon, Oxygen, and Hydrogen atoms. If you threw these elements in a jar and supplied enough energy to let them be whatever the lowest energy state is, you'd get C02 and H20. To make sugar, you have to pull these atoms away from where they'd go on their own (which takes work) and into the complex structure of the sucrose molecule (which takes more work.) But sugar doesn't just catch fire, because the transition state is high enough energy to prevent this spontaneous combustion. Sugar will burn, but we have to light it on fire first. It's exactly the same with the book. It will fall, but we have to give it enough energy to fall through the transition state. |
| 撮影日 | 2016-01-15 11:41:05 |
| 撮影者 | tdowd1982 |
| 撮影地 |