Citizen Science #22 by Jamie Zvirzdin
Energy Demystified: The Bolts and Volts of Electric Energy
"With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet,” Dr. Victor Frankenstein says in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” On this dramatic night, set not in a Gothic castle in October but in a German city apartment in November, he would harness the raw power of electric energy.
Even though Mary Shelley mentions galvanism in Chapter 2 of the novel—alluding to Luigi Galvani’s early experiments “animating” dead frogs with channeled lightning, making frog muscles convulse—Shelley never explicitly wrote that Victor placed bolt-like electrodes on the monster’s neck, nor that Victor used electricity to animate his Creature. All the same, subsequent movies—particularly James Whale’s 1931 film adaptation—and our collective imagination over time have solidified in our minds the spooky castle, the laboratory with wires and glass tubes, lightning and thunder, bolts and volts.
Perhaps this is because electricity still seems as mysterious as life itself, even entwined with life itself: our brain cells send pulses of electricity to talk to each other, and shock paddles (or sticky defibrillator pads, more frequently used since COVID-19 began) can restart failing rhythms of the heart. And we all know you should never climb over electric fences—particularly ones from Jurassic Park. So what exactly is this enigmatic power that can, indeed, spark life—or destruction?
At its core, electric energy is the work done to move electric charges. If, like Sisyphus, I push a boulder uphill, it takes effort—and that effort is stored as gravitational potential energy (for more about potential energy, read Citizen Science #16, “Potential Energy’s Untapped Value,” on Allotsego.com). Likewise, when we move electric charges against an electric field, we store electric potential energy. The energy stored is proportional to the amount of charge moved and the strength of the electric field. This energy can then be released, performing work—lighting a bulb, heating a filament, or, in Dr. Frankenstein’s case, animating something far more extraordinary.