E Is for Energy

An SBCC professor emeritus and former UCSB lecturer in physics,
Professor Elwood Schapansky retired several years ago to be reborn
as a glacier-hopping pilot, ferrying climbers and tourists to Mt.
McKinley. But he is still a good and patient teacher.

Last Wednesday afternoon, by the heat of a wood-burning stove
and the refracted light of numerous prisms, he sat and talked with
Martha Sadler for almost two hours about Einstein, electrons, and
why the sky is blue. And eventually, after some initial resistance,
he gave up the secret of E=MC².

What follows is an edited transcript of that discussion.
If energy is neither created nor destroyed, where does it
come from?