Energy is something that is without form, but somehow wraps the world around its little finger. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says it can never be created nor destroyed -- that a constant amount exists in the universe, and always has, and always will. Yet this scientific cornerstone is an astounding concept that seems to be contradicted on a daily basis. How about the energy created by gas exploding in a combustion engine, suddenly powering the several hundred pounds of your motor vehicle down the road? Or a Bicyclist surging up a steep grade with relentless upward momentum? What about the finite energy resources so hotly debated in the new National Energy Bill? These examples all suggest that Energy can somehow be both created and destroyed.

If you actually want to have a handle on the scientific understanding of energy, it's better to look at the world as a gigantic energy trading game, where no one gets cheated, but not all trades are exactly fair. This is because different kinds of energy have different inherent values to the systems using them. Inside a combustion engine, the potential energy stored in gasoline is equally traded into kinetic energy (the motion of the piston) and thermal energy (heat), but these forms aren't as useful to the engine as the original fuel. In a slightly different situation, however, the thermal energy produced in a power plant is used to heat water and drive a steam turbine that ultimately leads to the storage of electrical energy. The world is a massive energy bazaar, divided into finite and individual stalls. Depending on the magnification, cells are autonomous dealers in energy exchange, as are human beings, Enron, and cities as well. In fact, the word "organism" might best be described as a discrete body that encapsulates a series of energy transfers to power it.

If you set the lens just so, the Tour de France is an energy trading jamboree, with the combined powers teaming up to drive something that resembles a fully functional being. Each of its parts has a unique contribution to the survival of the whole. Hopefully this metaphor can simply serve as a vehicle to display a few interesting energy facts stored within le Tour. The idea of this piece is to play the energy trading game in ways you might not have thought. Energy is such an abstract concept anyway, it usually helps to ground it.

Oxygen
Without oxygen there is no life. This simple fact derives from the key position of this molecule in the reactions of cellular respiration -- the process that regenerates ATP and drives every energetic process in all living things. Without the racers there is no race. Each year, cyclists from around the world are deposited inside France to speed in a circle around the country, capturing the eyes of the world in the most famous and elegant of competitions. If the combined energy output of all the finishing riders of this years race, accrued over the entire length of the journey was released all at once, the result would be an explosion equivalent to the combustion of 40,000 pounds of TNT. If all this explosive were placed in the right locations, it would be enough to do this ten times over. Or to put it a different way, each rider who completes the tour would have to eat about 215 big macs to fuel his completeion of the entire race. And that's only taking into account the time they spend riding the bike.

Blood
Its important to realize that oxygen can't go anywhere in the body without blood. Once entering the lungs, oxygen would quickly dissipate back out into air if the alveoli didn't transfer it to awaiting red blood cells to be rushed off to feed the inner recesses of a tissue. Without their large motor-powered entourage, the cyclists wouldn't get very far either. Who could finish the race without a replacement tire? How would the outside world follow the excitement without the unfailing documentation by television cameras and journalists? The huge mass of vehicles are in a second race -- breaking the way for, and chasing the human-powered racers for almost 2500 miles. There are 1500 vehicles that wind their way through France chasing the under 200 actual riders. After the 44 team cars, the 600 vans and cars of the caravan, there are hundreds more supporting vehicles to set up a traveling carnival of sorts in 20 towns across the French countryside. If you combusted all the petrol used to power these vehicles over the whole race, you'd get an explosion about a quarter the size of the Hiroshima atomic bomb blast. Or if you still can't handle the explosive examples, it would also be enough energy to power the entire state of Rhode Island for a month.

Vessels
Blood isn't going very far either without a comprehensive system to transport it around, and the human body has around 93,000 miles of blood vessels. Here, the scale of our metaphor is switched slightly; the Tour only has 2233 miles of vessels and occupies the space of an entire country! The vessels of the race are not the roads, but the people along nearly every kilometer of road. Even in the most remote locations, there seems to be an epithelial lining of people along the roads to watch the race. In some places the wall of people is thin like a capillary, while in others it is as thick as an artery. This would have to be the case, as an estimated 15 million people watched the peleton whiz by during this year's race. And it really is just a whiz; It would be rare for any of these spectators to get more than a glimpse of the peleton, but maybe 20 heartbeats worth since they are excited. If you add up the energy needed to power all of these heartbeats, you'd only be able to power one tv for one half of the total tour coverage.

Body
The race is not the reason for the body existing, yet it can't be housed without the body. The oxygen delivered by the racers doesn't really fuel the country of France for a month, but the full attention of the country, and much of the world for that matter, is focused on the spectacle for the course of the competition. Born through struggle and selection, Lance Armstrong has been the virus of the Tour. Throughout the past 7 years he has hijacked the mechanisms of the body to generate an inordinate amount of attention to his interests. The virus does not have motives, it just acts. The virus infects in order to replicate? Maybe he has spurned a spread of cycling fans. How much of the tour energy was devoted to talking about Lance in this just finished 2005 race? One can only imagine. But Its possible that things will settle back down to a equilibrated state now that he has worn the yellow jersey for the last time. But of course, hundreds of years of medicine have taught us that disease is infinitely more interesting than health. We shall have to wait and see what the energy is traded for next year.

« Previous Next »