I have a lot of fun with people who think math has no effect on them. They sort of live in a world of Alternative Intelligence. At the extreme end are people who believe they can pass laws to repeal laws of nature. Watching these folks in action is truly hilarious.
Wintertime provides the most fun. If you missed it, search the keywords “Tesla Graveyards in Chicago” for news stories this week of electric cars out of gas in the blizzard. Below a certain temperature, batteries will not recharge. It turns out that electrons move slowly in cold temperatures and the chemical process a battery uses to produce energy fares poorly in frigid conditions.
Who knew?
Well, actually, physicists knew. Not much surprises a physicist because he lives in the real world of Nature. If math is the legislature of Natural Law, physics is the police force.
Math deals in facts, essentially “right or wrong,” “yes or no” or “one or zero” which makes it inconvenient for many Utopians. So, for instance:
It’s pretty much that simple (unless you are Schrodinger’s cat).
People do dumb things. Taking a selfie while leaning backwards over a cliff is a bad idea. Still, it has a mathematical explanation. The photographic genius is maximizing the view angle of the picture at the cost of minimizing the length of his remaining life. Politicians can’t have this. They need stupid people to vote for them. They pass laws making it illegal to lean backwards over a cliff holding your cellphone. These laws are ignored, not just by the gene-cleansing Dufus with the camera but more importantly by the Law of Gravity. Man’s laws are something the Universe gives humans to play with while waiting for Nature to act.
Nature acted in Chicago this week. Virtue signaling electric car owners got the physics lesson they missed in High School. Now they need to march on the Illinois statehouse and demand a law be passed that prohibits snow.
So let’s take a short, hard look at the Great Mistake of Transportation. Humans want to move quickly and effortlessly over the surface of the earth. Sucking a black, gooey substance out of the ground and burning it in a billion internal combustion engines which expel toxic residue into the atmosphere is not a good idea. Batteries are made of a number of toxic substances that are dug out of the ground and when partially expended will be left distributed all over the earth (please don’t tell me otherwise), to leach poisons into the ground water. 60% of the electricity generated to re-charge (when you can) car batteries is produced by burning fossil fuels. That was a better idea?
Perhaps only in the summer.
By owning a hybrid, I get to use fossil fuels twice over in the form of gasoline and production of NiMh batteries that use the natural resources of cobalt, manganese, nickel, lithium and graphite. There is also the twelve volt battery that gets the hybrid battery started. I am promised that the batteries are fully recyclable. ??