The source of any energy and change

Life and the Universe itself would not be possible if everything stood still, did not move, and never changed. 

Just think for a second about it. Isn’t it true? I think so.

Everything is moving and changing all the time. Why? What drives the change?

I never thought about it until recently, then tried to find an answer. It turned out to be not easy. There is plenty of information on the net, but no direct answer to these questions. So, I looked for indirect ones (the circumstantial evidence, so to say).

What I have discovered, reminded me of Wittgenstein’s observation from Philosophical Investigations, 129: “The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something — because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. — And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.“

The conclusion I came to was that our Universe got a push during Big Bang and rolls since on that initial bump of energy.

You know about the law of energy conservation, don’t you? It is also called the first law of thermodynamics, which can be defined as follows: “The total energy of an isolated system is constant; energy can be transformed from one form to another, but can be neither created nor destroyed.”

This means that, once the total energy of our universe was created, it remains the same, just changes its form. And that is the source of all the changes and movements we observe.

And what is energy? By definition, it is an ability to do work/change anything. On the most elementary level, it manifests as the notorious quantum instability. The elementary particles are losing (and become more stable) and absorbing (and become less stable) energy all the time. The energy is packed as an electromagnetic wave, also called a photon.

Like a wave that pounds onto the shore and changes it, the same way the photon pounds another particle and changes it: the particle absorbs the photon, becomes unstable, and either emits the excess energy as a photon or falls apart.

The same happens when we breathe, for example. The iron molecules lose the electrons pulled away by greedy oxygen ions (that’s why we need oxygen to live). Two electrons and an oxygen atom form a stable water molecule and emit excess energy (as photons) that is used to create (in mitochondria) Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) molecule. The newly minted ATP is used as energy storage for a short period of time–enough to take part in some life-sustaining process inside the cell. That is when they are broken into stable parts, the energy is released and used, while the stable parts are used again (to be forced together into ATP to store energy).

Here are a few more ATP-related facts: 

The energy used by human cells in an adult requires the hydrolysis of 100 to 150 moles  (1 mol = 6 with 23 zeros) of ATP daily, which is around 50 to 75 kg. A human will typically use up his or her body weight of ATP over the course of the day. Each equivalent of ATP is recycled 1000–1500 times during a single day (100 / 0.2 = 500).

But whatever mechanism for energy transformation and usage is used, the source of all the energy in the Universe is the Big Bang. It kicked the Universe into existence and everything that happens since is the reverberation of that kick.

Isn’t it amazing? For me, it explains a lot.