The central topic of this course is energy. Everybody has some idea of what the word energy means. For those who saw the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, in 1984, energy seemed to be best represented by Mary Lou Retton, a sixteen year old athlete who became the first American woman to win a gold medal in gymnastics by achieving two perfect scores in the final events. That idea of energy is in common use, but in this course we shall restrict the meaning somewhat. Another goal, supplementing that intuitive sense, is to understand the numbers and units involved in dealing scientifically and technologically with energy.
Numbers play an important role because the scale of the energy needed to keep out society is huge.
Commercially, energy is measured in strange units - barrels of oil, tons of coal, cubic meters of gas, megawatt hours of electricity, etc. In this vein, we need to address the consequences of energy transformations, such as depletion of resources and the generation of pollution.