[Vwdiesel] Burning water?

[Rolf Pechukas]

>> that's exactly the kind of thing that Mother Nature does allow, if
>> you are lucky enough to find the key
>> time will tell if these guys have found it
>
> Such as?
>
> -james


oh, let's see
such as:

applying a small initial investment of kinetic energy to a carbon  
mass in the presence of oxygen to initiate a self-sustaining  
exothermic chemical reaction between the carbon and the oxygen where  
bonding energy is released in the form of infra-red and visible  
photons (heat and light) as those elements combine

(we forget that fire, too, had to be 'discovered')

you get more energy out of this reaction than you put into it
sure, you need the 'fuel'
but there's air all around us, and sticks on the ground

now who actually thought of rubbing those sticks together?
some cave-man or -woman
but that's a neat little 'key' that someone found into the treasure  
chest of nature some time ago in our history

(little bit more of an explanation:
nature is actually 'happier', i.e. more relaxed, when oxygen and  
carbon are bonded together
it is a more efficient bond than the separate bonds of oxygen with  
oxygen and carbon with carbon
both are stable alone, but there is a lot of energy 'entrained', or  
bound up, in that stability
so when we allow the oxygen and carbon to get friendly, to get  
closer, by 'heating them up' or bombarding them gently with photons,  
as we do when we rub two sticks together or apply a blowtorch, when  
we let them mingle by applying heat, then they are free to react and  
bond with each other, and energy is released by that bonding -  
they're happier together
it's like this: two men can have a good friendship, and a reasonable  
attraction, but put some women in the room and it's good-bye Charlie  
(strike that and reverse it for gay couples)
and just like there's a lot of energy released when men and women  
bond, so there is a lot of energy released when oxygen and carbon bond)


another caveman moment from some time later:
hmmm
how 'bout if I take some oxygen, like say from this air I'm breathing
and SPRAY some carbon into it, like say from this jar of peanut oil  
in my hand
and create a kind of a MIST or VAPOR
and then what if I SQUEEZE that mist together, compress it so hard  
that it EXPLODES (!)
and if I CONTAIN that explosion, and direct the expansion of those  
gasses, so that they PUSH, say, a piston through a cylinder, then I  
might be able to get a little more work done on this farm here...

that caveman's name was Rudolph Diesel, as we all know
and he refined that first oxygen/carbon bonding 'key' into a neat  
little application we all on this list know and love and use to drive  
us around


or
another caveman idea from some time later:
hmmm
what if we took some heavy heavy stuff
and smashed it together so hard with other heavy stuff
that it BROKE some of the bonds WITHIN some of the atoms in the heavy  
heavy stuff?
and what if breaking those ATOMIC bonds released so much energy that  
it broke more bonds inside other atoms?
and if the breaking bonds kept breaking bonds, this could go on as  
long as I kept feeding it more heavy stuff...

we call this caveman discovery, of course, 'nuclear fission' (not to  
be confused with 'fusion', which we all know happens in the sun all  
day long, but which no one has been able to recreate stably here on  
planet earth yet)

but just another example of one of those little keys to nature's  
inner workings, where you can put in a finite amount of energy, in  
the presence of some matter that we happen to have access to here on  
earth, and realize far more energy FROM the reaction than you than  
you put INTO it (so long as you don't use up all the matter, right  
George?)



so, what IS the actual potential FUEL energy of water?

(well, there's always the atomic potential of anything, but leaving  
that aside...)

I don't know how strongly oxygen and hydrogen are bound together in  
water
or how much energy might be released by reacting the elements separately
or whether such a reaction could produce a net energy gain, or be  
self-sustaining

but certainly other (plentiful on planet earth) forms of matter have  
shown themselves to be susceptible to such advantageous  
recombinations - why not water?