6/10/18
E=MCsquared
 
I think car pollution is something you really notice when you live in a city. I lived in New York City for 11 years on the lower West Side for a while and then on the lower East Side. NYC is basically a grid with streets running East and West and avenues running North and South. One thing I definitely noticed was the pollution for the dense congestion from people and especially vehicles. Exhaust from cars and trucks was unescapable. You choked on it when you walked down the street. I could see the black soot build up on my apartment window. I found the comment in class about how even a beautifully tuned car has only 37% efficiency really interesting. Einstein's famous formula E=MCsquared is saying that energy and mass are essentially the same thing. In the case of the burning of gasoline for energy to make the car go, is not 100% one to one conversion. There is 37% efficiency and the rest is lost to biproducts or pollution. It makes me wonder about different technologies that would be more efficient in getting people from point A to point B. Why can't we just switch over to a more sustainable method? We are definitely taking too long to turn the ship around!

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