In 1759, ten years after she died in childbirth, the physicist and philosopher Émilie du Châtelet published her magnum opus, a French translation of Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, along with her own commentary. Of course, Châtelet's work was actually published by her friend, mathematician Alexis-Claude Clairaut, due to her death as well as her gender. (Source)
Châtelet wrote many works and posited many theories in her brief lifetime, but one that most high school graduates should recognize is the principle of the conservation of energy. In her commentary on Newton's Principia, Émilie du Châtelet argued that, as a contemporary textbook writer says, "there is a certain quantity, which we call energy, that does not change in the manifold changes which nature undergoes." Or, as I was more simply taught, "energy is neither created nor destroyed." Take a nuclear bomb explosion that releases kilotons of energy in an instant. According to Châtelet's principle, this energy already existed in the form of matter, and was merely rapidly converted into energy by the process of nuclear fission.
Not that Châtelet predicted the nuclear bomb. She was, after all, a woman who only witnessed forty-two years of the eighteenth century. But her principle of the conservation of energy lasted long beyond her time on this earth.
163 years before Châtelet's posthumous publication, a very different soul published a very different work. Englishman Edmund Spenser, rival and contemporary of the one and only William Shakespeare, was a poet who sought to gain courtly favor with Queen Elizabeth. He therefore wrote what remains, to this day, one of the longest poems in the English language: The Faerie Queene. Composing six books, and introducing a new form of poetic verse to boot, this epic poem praised (and, perhaps, according to some scholars, subtly critiqued) the Queen of England. It is in Book III, Canto II of Spenser's work that we find a lovely sentiment:
"What though the sea with waves continuall[y]
N[or] is the earth the less, or loseth ought:
For whatsoever from one place doth fall
Is with the tide unto another brought:
For there is nothing lost, that may be found if sought."
(Source; lightly edited for clarity and emphasis by Kate DiTullio)
What does it matter if the ocean continuously eats the earth? Spenser asks. Does the ocean (as a whole) grow larger? Does the earth (as a whole) become smaller? Even taking into account erosive forces, his point stands: Whatever the tide takes from one place shows up in another.
There is nothing lost, that may be found if sought.
A dramatic statement, yes. But it aligns with Châtelet's principle of the conservation of energy.
And now we find ourselves in a year unlike any other in recent memory. Over seven hundred seventy thousand people around the world have died in the last seven months from COVID-19. As of this writing, 10.2% of USA citizens are unemployed. Racial inequities are finally being brought to the forefront of the United States' national attention, but little real action is being taken to change these unjust disparities on a national level. Authoritarian governments are on the rise around the world.
As you and I consider this cacophony of despair, what can we do? As the horrors mount with the death tolls, as tyranny tightens its noose around a once-free people, as the innocent suffer while the evil exult, what can we do?
For my sanity, I am holding on to the principle that energy is neither created nor destroyed. In a sense, I take this to mean that my actions, however powerless they may feel, constitute a real effect in this world. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, meaning that no energy is lost. I donate to nonprofits doing work I believe in? I teach students to be empathetic and humble? I learn how to be a better ally to people with marginalized and oppressed identities? Even if these actions feel infinitely insignificant, they are anything but.
Call it foolishness or worse if you want. But there is too much evil in this world to scoff at even the smallest good.
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