if energy isn’t a physical thing what is it?
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Short answer, stuff happening. Or sometimes the potential for something to happen.
Take a brick from the ground and put it on a high shelf and you’ve turned some of your body’s biological energy into potential kinetic energy. Push the brick off the high shelf and you’re turning potential kinetic energy into actual kinetic energy. Strap a magnet to the brick and have it pass a coil of copper wire on the way down and some of that kinetic energy will create an imbalance between electrons and protons, creating electrical potential energy. Let this imbalance rebalance it’self and you get random atomic movement or heat.
We treat energy like a substance because one event leads to another and to another and the magnitude of one event often determines how big the next one is. In this way we can say “Energy is transferred” but in truth we are merely holding onto one link in a chain of events.
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