We have lots of animals in our garden. Possums, bats, a couple of dogs, a cat, some huge spiders and probably some other ones too. Last week our Swedish friend Anders visited Melbourne and stayed at our house, but after a couple of nights of keeping us awake with his snoring, we had no other option than letting him sleep in our tent in the garden.
He had a hard time sleeping the first night. All animals (domestic and wild) fought and made a lot of noise. All motion and energy kept him awake.
I thought about the law of conservation of energy – the one that states that energy cannot be destroyed, but only changed into another form of energy. Maybe the hustle and the bustle of all the animals during the night (kinetic animal energy) could be converted into something useful. To power our fridge for instance.
Next day Anders and I looked in our shed and found various old springs and other rusty metal things that we assembled. Et voilà! We had built a machine that could convert kinetic animal energy into friction.
The whole episode reminded me of a quote by Jack Handey – quite possibly the Isaac Newton of our time:
“We like to praise birds for flying. But how much of it is actually flying, and how much of it is just sort of coasting from the previous flap?”
