2
0
I haven’t been very actively on this site lately, I’ve been consumed by politics, the last refuge of the damned, so called because it makes so many people unhappy! So, I thought I’d have a break from the madness of Substack, Twitter and whatnot to do something life affirming and gift you all with a short article on the nature of physics and the wonder that it inspires in me and, I hope lots of other people too, who spend their evenings looking up at the stars in awe.
In conversation with others I often find that they have a mystical/spiritual understanding of energy that doesn’t exactly help their cause, years ago I would have smugly crushed them in a heated debate or a round of endless pontifications, but I’m older now and instead let them wallow in their comforting ignorance. I don’t have the right to disturb any other person’s peace of mind in anything but the gentlest of ways and then only if it’s necessary…
This is not exactly philosophy but philosophy underpins so much science, so it’s good to know.
What is energy?
Many people wrongly imagine matter and energy as opposites, as though the two would explode if they ever met. But that confusion belongs to matter and antimatter, not matter and energy.
Matter and energy are not enemies; they are deeply related. Modern physics shows that mass is a form of energy, which is why Einstein’s equation, E = mc², matters so much. A particle does not need to “vibrate” in order to have energy, which is a common misconception.
It may have energy because it has mass, because it is moving, because it sits within a field, or because of the way it interacts with other particles.
Energy, then, is not simply matter in motion. Motion is only one form of energy.
Energy is better understood as a measurable property of a physical system: its capacity to do work, cause change, produce heat, emit light, or be stored in matter and fields.
Matter, energy, and force are therefore connected, but they are not the same thing. Matter is the stuff involved; energy is what the system can do; force is an interaction that can change motion.
Energy is in a funny sort of way a type of cosmological currency, the universe’s own version of money.
Money is not a single physical substance. It can be coins, notes, numbers in a bank account, debt, credit, wages, or investments. What matters is not the material form, but what it allows us to do, that being exchange it into goods, buy that fancy car, transfer to another person thousands of miles away, those Nigerian Generals, cash it and store it in a shoebox under the bed, convert into the staff of life, that being the archaic term for bread, then there’s essentials like tea and milk or coffee for our non-British friends.
Energy is similar, though the analogy is imperfect, it is a quantity that can be stored, transferred, converted, and accounted for. A car battery, a falling stone, a hot stove, a beam of sunlight, and a moving truck all “have energy,” but not because they contain the same glowing substance. They have energy because of their physical state and what that state can do.
Why is this important? Why do particles vibrate in the wild? Why does reality have any energy at all? Why is the universe dynamic rather than inert and why do physical systems possess the capacity for change?
We can describe energy with extraordinary precision, but that does not mean we have exhausted its mystery. Physics can measure how much energy a system has, calculate how it is transferred, and predict what changes it can produce. Yet beneath those measurements remains a deeper question, why does reality have this capacity for change at all?
Why should matter possess mass, motion, charge, fields, and interactions in the first place? Science gives us powerful descriptions of how energy behaves, but the fact that the universe is dynamic, active, and capable of producing change is still something worthy of wonder.
The hairs on the back of my neck often go up when I look at the night sky, I’m filled with awe, the reason why all of it exists fills me with wonder. It makes me feel inconsequential, but nevertheless special. It’s mystical in feeling tone, but real. We know how it all works but not why?
Enter Richard Feynman
The physicist and educator Richard Feynman warned that science is strongest when answering questions about how things happen, how systems behave, how causes unfold, how one state gives rise to another. But the deeper “why” questions are more difficult. Why does reality exist at all? Why should there be laws, matter, energy, change, or consciousness? At that level, science can describe the pattern with extraordinary precision, but it may not satisfy the human hunger for ultimate explanation. This for me at least, is one of the reasons why I like him so much as a scientist and an educator. He approaches everything with deep humility and doesn’t claim to have all of the answers, his essential message is that we know what we know, and have to be content with the idea that there are some things that we’ll just never understand. Feynman’s lectures on physics do much to inform my philosophy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
