Do you trust science with your life?  

Melodrama ahoy! The awesome-filled show “Brainiac”, featuring Richard Hammond from Top-Gear takes on the conservation of energy. The idea is no doubt taken from professor Walter Lewins (MIT) physics lectures (which are awesome, available at MIT Open Courseware for free), but in true Top-Gear spirit, they’ve spiced it up a bit (and god knows science sometimes needs spicing up).




You’ve probably heard it times and times again, “Energy is conserved!”, but what does it mean? Well it means that in a closed system, energy can not be created and it can not be destroyed, it can only be re-arranged. An example of a closed system would for example be the Universe, this means that there is always the same amount of energy in the Universe, that is, the energy today is the same as the energy only a few seconds after the big bang. The only difference is, it is now spread over a much larger area (because the universe is expanding). An example of an open system would for example be earth, we receive energy constantly from the sun, so the total amount of energy available on earth is not a constant.In practice you can approximate a lot of things as a closed system, which makes calculations a lot easier in. For example if you are only thinking about gravity, you can approximate earth as a closed system and say that energy is conserved. So if it takes an x-amount of energy to put a bowling ball on a 10 meter tall diving board, it will have exactly that same amount of energy right before it hits the ground, in kinetic energy (energy of movement).