Q. E. D. | Page 8

have the general law of the Conservation of Energy, which says that energy can be neither manufactured nor destroyed, but merely transformed and directed. And this magnificent law, like that of the conservation of matter, is strong evidence that there must have been a real Creation at some time in the long ago, different not merely in degree but in kind from anything known to modern science.
Joule worked out the mechanical equivalent of heat by means of his now famous experiment of churning water. He reasoned that if the heat produced by friction, etc., is really energy in another form, then the same amount of heat must always be generated by the expenditure of a given amount of motion or mechanical work. And this must be true, no matter whether this work is expended in overcoming the friction between wood on wood, iron on iron, or in any other conceivable way. Accordingly, he devised an experiment in which paddle wheels were made to rotate in a vessel of water by means of falling weights somewhat like the weights of a clock. The amount of work represented by the falling of the weights was easily calculated, and so was the amount of rise in temperature of the water caused by the friction of the water with the rotating paddle wheels. In various other ways he measured the amount of heat generated by a measured amount of work; and as the result of all his experiments (with very slight corrections made since by means of more exact apparatus), we now know that 778 foot pounds of work produce heat enough to raise one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit; or stated in the metric system, 427 kilogram meters of work will produce a calorie of heat.
Since these record-making experiments by Joule, the matter has been verified over and over again in all sorts of ways; and almost every kind of display of energy has been measured with more or less exactness. Even the amount of food oxidized in the human body is now known to be capable of correlation with the other forms of energy, though necessarily very minute exactness of measurement is scarcely attainable in this case. But no scientist of to-day doubts that all the physiological processes of animals or of plants conform exactly to the law of the conservation of energy that energy is neither created nor destroyed by any means known to science. In other words, the amount of energy in our world, if science can at all determine such a matter, seems to be _a fixed quantity_, gradually being dissipated into space, it is true, but momently replenished from the sun at exactly the same rate now as hundreds or thousands of years ago. And while this energy is in our world it is always capable of exact correlation in all of its multitudinous forms, and is transformable back and forth without increase and without loss.
On the discovery of the radioactive substances in 1896, some persons hastily concluded that the law of the conservation of energy was contradicted by the astonishing way in which these substances acted. But further and more accurate experiments have set this matter at rest, as indeed might have been expected; for the law of gravitation itself is not more immovably established in the make-up of the universe than this magnificent law that energy cannot be created by any means which we call natural.
In all ages there have been men who have spent their lives in the vain effort to invent a machine out of which work could constantly be obtained without the expenditure upon it of an equal amount of work. But the United States patent office has got so tired of receiving applications for patents based on this idea of perpetual motion that they have long since refused to issue any such patent where this principle is the manifest object; and I suppose the governments of other countries have taken a similar stand. And why? Because they know that energy cannot now be created by any device, no matter how ingenious; and they refuse to become a party to any scheme that seems to imply that this modern creation of energy is within the bounds of possibility.
Yet what is all this but a confirmation of the declaration long ago made that "the works were finished from the foundation of the world" (Heb. 4:3)? True, the energy we are constantly employing seems to come to us from the sun; but we must remember that the sun and its family of the solar system, including the earth, were all made at the same time, that they are bound together as parts of an indissoluble whole. Accordingly, no one can say that the total amount of energy called into existence at the creation of