For example, we have chemical energy in the form of fuels and can convert that chemical energy into electricity. How does that process work? How can we turn kinetic energy of wind mills to electricity? How does sunlight turn into heat energy? How come we can measure energy in Joules when there are so many forms of it?
In: Chemistry
Adding to the other answers, a more philosophical take:
“Forms of energy” are a simplification – a convenient picture. In theoretical physics, there are no ‘forms’ of energy, there is only a single concept of ‘energy’, which can usually be broken up into ‘potential’ and ‘kinetic’ parts – referring to the part of energy that is dependent on the system’s state, and the part of energy that is dependent on the system’s rate of change, respectively.
But basically, when we say something like “energy is converted from X to Y” we are not really being rigorous. What it means is “when you want to analyze the dynamics of this problem, you should include both terms for X and terms for Y – terms for other things are negligible and can ignored”.
A full picture of physics would be needlessly difficult if not outright impossible to apply to practical problems, so in practice we oversimplify things until what’s left are the relevant parts of the whole. Simplifications like these are why we speak of ‘forms’ of energy so often, even though it’s fundamentally a caricature of what’s really happening.
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