ENERGY and Einstein

The Captain's car is sick again.  It needs a new catalytic converter (or some such), which will take both time and money.  So he will be using my little car in the interim.

Roger came on Monday and stayed over.  He is doing another of his immense journeys seeing family and friends and taking in three continents in the process.  Amazing.  

It was lovely to see him again, and brought back so many happy memories. He is such good company.  And I also marvel at the energy he still has. He is only a year younger than me, the same age as the Captain in fact.  

They both have more energy than I do. Mind you, who doesn't these days?  However, the last Circuit Overseer talk of the week was  TIRED, BUT NOT TIRING OUT.  It was to remind us that Jehovah is the Source of energy, that he has a limitless supply of energy, and can give us energy if we will just ask.  

To give us a glimpse into what an immense Source of energy Jehovah is, the C.O. explained nuclear fission and the famous Einstein equation so simply that, for the first time ever, I understood it.

It may have  taken me over seventy years - well over - but, at last... and by the way, I put "power" into the search engine of Col's blog, the photo gallery, and came up with the above photo of Southwick Power Station.

Anyway, the C.O. explained that it takes an immense amount of energy to create even a small bit of matter - so when you reverse that, as in nuclear fission, and split just a tiny part of it, the power released is immense.

And that, apparently, is what Einstein's famous equation was all about.  

Then the C.O. talked about the size of the Milky Way in these terms - I am hoping that my notes are correct here: In one second light travels over 180,000 miles, so think, if you are up to the maths, how far it would travel in a year...  The word is mind-boggling.

The the C.O, asked us how long it would take for light to travel from one end of the Milky Way to the other.  The answer was apparently 100,000 years - that, bear in mind, is light years.  That is an immensity of time I can't really comprehend.  But the point the Speaker was making is to try to think about how much energy must it have taken to create that much matter - and to remember that the Milky Way is just a small part of the Universe, just a detail in its immensity.

Jehovah is the Source of all this energy. The Hebrew Scriptures told us that thousands of years ago.

And we can ask him to give us some of that energy so that we can keep going.

As Isaiah, speaking under inspiration, tells us:

“Lift up your eyes to heaven and see.

Who has created these things?

It is the One who brings out their army by number;

He calls them all by name.

Because of his vast dynamic energy and his awe-inspiring power,

Not one of them is missing."

- Isaiah 40:26