Like, i know it’s the ability to do work and all that, but this isn’t what energy is, it’s what energy does. What IS energy tho?
In: Physics
energy is kind of counterintuitive because it is less something that makes things happen and more a way to describe what is happening.
So we see an object move from a to b, we say „the object apparently had more energy in place a, so it moved to place b to reduce the energy“ Now what this means is basically „seems like the object had a reason to move, so it moved.“ it‘s as general as possible.
like when something falls down. It used to be high, it wasn‘t lying ontop of anything, so it fell to the ground. The reason, as we know, is gravity. But maybe if we don‘t know the reason or if the reason is too complicated and unimportant, we might want to just say „there was pontential to move, and then it moved“.
It sounds weird when you describe everyday phenomena like that but basically everything has an energy level that is influenced by everything around it.
You have a child, the child has two friends and he wants to visit one of them. Friend 1 has an annoying little brother while friend 2 has strict parents who don‘t let their kids watch tv. Say, for the kid the annoying brother is worse than a lack of tv. So based on this, we can give the houses an inherent attractiveness score. The home has a low level of attractiveness, house 1 has a higher score but house 2 has the highest score (energy is inverted for math reasons, so high score means low energy). we can play with that by giving family 1 candy for the kids or buying an x-box for the home. This alters the scores but it‘s always low score => high score.
The attractiveness score isn‘t necessarily something physical but it definitely exists as a property of the houses. Our child has desires and free will, but technically we don‘t have to know that to determine the attractiveness score. we just have to watch the child long enough and figure out all relevant parameters. And this is how we determine the energy levels of things in relation to other things. Molecules might not have a conscious desire to move and bind and split, but they do so all the same. And we can give each possible state an energy level, that reflects how it‘s gonna behave and then we can do a whole lot of math with that.
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