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
While it seems unrelated, I think this video is very relevant:
It’s part of an interview with Richard Feynman, in which he was asked about what magnetism is. His answer discusses how the problem with this sort of question is that the answers can keep being broken down with more questions until you eventually get to the real answer: that’s the way things are.
The most fundamental definition of energy is probably based on [Noether’s theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem), which tells us that any symmetry has an associated conservation law. In this case, it is the symmetry of time translation which has the associated property we call energy which is conserved. By time translation symmetry I basically mean that you get the same result if you do the same thing at different times.
This doesn’t really say what energy is, though, it just says that it’s a property which has a certain property…
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