January 28, 2004
Epiphany entropy
My old friend and mentor Canon P D Quirk is concerned that OoN is too often flippant and apt not to be read as the truly serious commentary it is intended to be. He said the only thing worse than the anecdotal is the trivial. It’s not the first time he’s pointed that out to me. This time, I took it to heart.
As everybody knows, there are three laws of thermodynamics, but the second law, the one that expresses the irreversibility of processes, is the only one that ever gets any press. It goes like this: Entropy always increases in any closed system not in equilibrium and remains constant for a system which is in equilibrium.
Now that that’s perfectly clear, remember in high school physics, we learned that it takes one calorie to heat one gram of water one degree centigrade. For example, if you eat a very cold dessert (which is largely water, anyhow), the digestive cycle takes its essential calories from the only available source — body fat.
A dessert served and eaten at near freezing will shortly be raised to our normal body temperature. For each gram of dessert eaten, that process takes approximately thirty-seven calories. The average dessert portion is about 168 grams.
The second law tells us that 6,216 calories are extracted from body fat as the dessert’s temperature is normalized. (To do the math takes more column inches than we’re normally allotted here.) Anyway, allowing for the 1,200 latent calories in the dessert, the net loss is approximately 5,000. Obviously, the more cold dessert you eat, the better off you are and the faster you will lose weight, if that is your goal, which it often is during the Epiphany season and the subsequent entropy of New Year’s resolutions.
Furthermore, this process works equally well when drinking very cold beer in frosted glasses. Each ounce of beer contains sixteen latent calories, but extracts 1,036 calories in the temperature normalizing process. Thus, the net calorie loss per ounce of beer is 1,020 calories. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to calculate that 12,240 calories are extracted from the body in the process of drinking a can of beer.
Ice cream is even more beneficial, since it takes eighty-three cal/gm to melt and an additional thirty-seven cal/gm to raise it to body temperature. The results here are really remarkable. The process beats running hands down.
Unfortunately, for those who eat pizza as an excuse to drink beer, pizza (loaded with latent calories and usually served above body temperature) induces an opposite effect. Thankfully, as the astute reader surely has already reasoned, the obvious solution is to drink a lot of beer with pizza and follow up immediately with large bowls of ice cream.
Maybe we’ll get around to the first and third laws of thermodynamics during Lent. In the meantime, try to get a little more out of the Epiphany letdown than usual. (Note: Questions are welcome. Answers? Well, that’s another matter.)
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