# Energy And Fields - What are they?

#### Cheerful Charlie

##### Contributor
It is very strange. I do not drink or smoke. Sometimes on a thread it smells like I am in an elevator with someone who stanks of srale tobacco smole and alcohol.

Somebody who needs a shower and a change of clothes.

At the start of the thread yiu did not understand scientifically what energy is and means and how it is used scintifically. Any exression of energy in a model or theory reduces to the SI definition.

If yiu are argung advanced theory without understand that then there is nothing to discuss.

The Feynman Lectures on Physics Vol I, p 4-1
When Feynman wrote,
“It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is,” he was recognizing that although we have expressions for various forms of energy (kinetic, heat, electrical, light, sound etc) we seem to have no idea of what the all-encompassing notion of “energy” is.

#### atrib

##### Banned
Banned
I drive a bus.
Does the bus run on steam?
Mostly on CNG. Some are Diesel. A couple of new ones are electric. No steam ones, sadly.
Too bad. I could have called upon you as an expert on Big Bang cosmology if you were well versed in the operation of steam powered engines and Steve could have moved you from the science fiction writer category to science subject matter expert based on your credentials.

#### steve_bank

##### Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
It is very strange. I do not drink or smoke. Sometimes on a thread it smells like I am in an elevator with someone who stanks of srale tobacco smole and alcohol.

Somebody who needs a shower and a change of clothes.

At the start of the thread yiu did not understand scientifically what energy is and means and how it is used scintifically. Any exression of energy in a model or theory reduces to the SI definition.

If yiu are argung advanced theory without understand that then there is nothing to discuss.

The Feynman Lectures on Physics Vol I, p 4-1
When Feynman wrote,
“It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is,” he was recognizing that although we have expressions for various forms of energy (kinetic, heat, electrical, light, sound etc) we seem to have no idea of what the all-encompassing notion of “energy” is.
I used to have a copy of it. Part of my library. Who says oytside of the sience he developed was a rational person?

It is a philosophical response. You can't quote such a statement without context. Energy is unambiguously defined in SI. That is what scientifically energy is. People conflate philosophy with science.

You ask me what energy is I will say 1 Joule = 1kg*(m/s)^2.

If you askme how much energy is stored in a capacitor I will say .5*C*v^2 Joules.

If you ask how much energy there is in moving object I'll say .5*m^v^2. Ignoring m*C^2 rest mass energy.

That means if a moving object and energy in a capacitor are equal then if all the energy in each can create the same amount of heat.

It is like saying if to objects are 1 meter long then they have the equivalent length.

So energy does not have any kind of independent reality any more than meters or kilograms.

Look at the wiki page on Joule's Paddle Wheel Experimenter. It reduces to a thermal equivalent.

Science objectively is comprised of equations that express quantities in SI units.

What anything 'is' is a metaphysical unanswerable question, which is why I put it in philosphy.

What is matter? The philosophical answer is anything that has mass is matter. Mass is defined in SI as the kilogram.

Mass and energyare arbitry units of measure in principle n differnt than the meter. The meters-kilograms-secomds or MKS system.

#### Cheerful Charlie

##### Contributor
Mass of an object depends on its velocity. Relativity. Physics is different from engineering with its approximations ignoring relativistic effects.

#### steve_bank

##### Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
Steve, cosmology makes note that we don't even understand where the capacity to do work comes from, or why, or have any clue how much capacity the vacuum has to fluctuate, and whether there are limits to this.

You make assumptions and declarations about what cannot possibly be the case when the fact is that reality will operate exactly as it will. Your paltry statements about what it can or can't do will not constrain where energy can or cannot "come from", and are just so much hot air blowing out your windhole(s).
I know you have no real idea of what I am talking about in my posts. Your are spinng philsophy as you go.

Theprincples of energy, work. and heat was as we have it today orignated in te 19th century from work with heat engines, connected by Joule's Paddle Wheel Experiment.

Energy, heat, and work are human created units of measure that are part of the SI system.

LOT apples to a bounded system. As the boundary increases without limit then conceptual problems arise. If entropy and LORThold then does the universe run down to a thermal equilibrium? If the universe can run down what would it up?

Someone I knew in the 80s said maybe there is a process we do not see that sumutaoly winds up the unversed, a cosmic perpetual motion machine.

#### Jarhyn

##### Wizard
I drive a bus.
Does the bus run on steam?
Mostly on CNG. Some are Diesel. A couple of new ones are electric. No steam ones, sadly.
Too bad. I could have called upon you as an expert on Big Bang cosmology if you were well versed in the operation of steam powered engines and Steve could have moved you from the science fiction writer category to science subject matter expert based on your credentials.
What I find laughable is that Steve has continued going on about philosophy when the fact is, their proclamations of where energy comes from is itself philosophical sophistry (claiming their definition of energy means that energy doesn't originate from "nothing").

We. Do. Not. Know. From. Whence. Comes. Energy.

We don't.

We have an idea about how some people tried to imagine energy within a system of macrophysics, and that fell apart when we pushed it too hard: conservation wasn't really a fact of the microscale, it's just a very strong statistical likelihood.

Just because these things have a definition in the SI dictionary makes that no more prescriptive than anything else.

But Steve wants to pretend that the words they use to describe them make any impact on the thing being described.

Energy will originate from whence it originates, which could be "nowhere at all", and nothing Steve says or does will change that.

#### steve_bank

##### Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
Mass of an object depends on its velocity. Relativity. Physics is different from engineering with its approximations ignoring relativistic effects.
That indicates ignorance. Functionally engineering or science there are equations and models using SI units. There is no other.

There is only SI units to play with.

Asking what energy 'is' i like asking what 'is' length and weight. Arbitrary units of measure. Anything beyond that is philsophy, mystcism, fiction, or pseudo scince.

Pop culture and vast amounts of scifi have coored people's views and understanding.

I struggled with this when I started out. I was expectong some kind of myscal revelation, until I fully understood it was all based in arbitray defintions.

If a theory can not be constructed with SI units then it can never be phonetically tested.

#### bilby

##### Fair dinkum thinkum
I drive a bus.
Does the bus run on steam?
Mostly on CNG. Some are Diesel. A couple of new ones are electric. No steam ones, sadly.
Too bad. I could have called upon you as an expert on Big Bang cosmology if you were well versed in the operation of steam powered engines and Steve could have moved you from the science fiction writer category to science subject matter expert based on your credentials.
Well, Monday 3 Oct is a Public Holiday here, and it's also one of my two weekly rostered days off. I put my name on the "want to work" list as soon as it came out, but sadly wasn't on the draft version of the counter summary.

However today I got an email asking me to work a full late shift on Monday, which implies 150% public holiday penalty, plus a 50% working day off penalty, plus a night work allowance for the last half of the shift. That implies seven hours and thirty six minutes at triple time, and likely at least a half hour at 350%, which is $97.80 an hour. Plus allowances, bringing the effective rate to just over$100 an hour. This will significantly improve my spending power.

Therefore we must conclude, as any basic physics text will tell us, that power is work overtime.

#### Jarhyn

##### Wizard
I drive a bus.
Does the bus run on steam?
Mostly on CNG. Some are Diesel. A couple of new ones are electric. No steam ones, sadly.
Too bad. I could have called upon you as an expert on Big Bang cosmology if you were well versed in the operation of steam powered engines and Steve could have moved you from the science fiction writer category to science subject matter expert based on your credentials.
Well, Monday 3 Oct is a Public Holiday here, and it's also one of my two weekly rostered days off. I put my name on the "want to work" list as soon as it came out, but sadly wasn't on the draft version of the counter summary.

However today I got an email asking me to work a full late shift on Monday, which implies 150% public holiday penalty, plus a 50% working day off penalty, plus a night work allowance for the last half of the shift. That implies seven hours and thirty six minutes at triple time, and likely at least a half hour at 350%, which is $97.80 an hour. Plus allowances, bringing the effective rate to just over$100 an hour. This will significantly improve my spending power.

Therefore we must conclude, as any basic physics text will tell us, that power is work overtime.
This post seems like a steam(y pile on the) table.

#### Jimmy Higgins

##### Contributor
I think the trouble sometimes is that we mistake processes becoming predictable with things making sense as being the same thing. The whole thing makes no sense. We are essentially empty space that is solid due to fundamental forces that have very little say at our scale of existence.
Energy is the quantitative difference in the entropy state of two points located in spacetime. It can be expressed as an absolute measure as the strength of gravitational interaction when it manifests as mass, and as a gradient when it manifests as a diffuse field.
Yeah, but what does it taste like?

#### steve_bank

##### Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
Funny how some people think nothing about using kilogrms, meters, and seconds without much mystery. Yet when it comes to energy which is defined in SI along with meters, kilograms, ad seconds they get mytcal and philosophical.

When you tink energy think SI Joules. Jouels, amperes, force, meters, kilograms, amd secods are defined units of measure.

Wow meters and seconds are really spooky, what 'is' a meter and a second. Key the Twilight Zone theme.

Captain Kirk!
Yes Spock, what is it?
Captain I am detecting a humongous energy field ahead.
Sulu, evasive maneuvers.
Captain the energy field has drained all our power. Engines are dead.(lights dim)

Captain Picard!
Yes Data, what is it?
Captain I am detecting a humongous energy field ahead.
Data, evasive maneuvers.
Captain the energy field has drained all our power. Engines are dead.(lights dim)

Captain Janeway!
Yes Tuvok, what is it?
Captain I am detecting a humongous energy field ahead.
Paris, evasive maneuvers.
Captain the energy field has drained all our power. Engines are dead.(lights dim)

Hmmm ... I am seeing a science fiction pattern here. The use of the word energy as a plot device. There is science fiction and philosophy, and then tere is physical science.

The only thing worth watching on Voyager was Seven Of Nine's boobs.

#### Jarhyn

##### Wizard
Steve, ultimately, SI is good for precise measuring of things in terms of other things.

Even so, a definition has no leverage on what something is, on a fundamental level.

Definitions can be wrong.

Definitions can be incomplete.

Definitions can be only contextually valid.

But most importantly, definitions are not prescriptive.

SI units are defined by a standards making body on the basis of what we thought we knew about the world.

That's all they have ever been.

Defining a unit of measure allows for defining it badly, vaguely, wrongly, or unusefully.

You might as well be arguing that because Christians defined "GOD" that GOD exists...

There are significant open questions about the nature of the vacuum.

Pretending that you know the answers because you defined something in some way that could very well be WRONG (and in fact in Steve's case, has repeatedly been proven so) is just silliness and faffery.

#### Swammerdami

Staff member
I try not to exercise my super-Mod powers — I'm a live-and-let-live kind of guy — but some of the posts in this thread seem almost pejorative.

It is very strange. I do not drink or smoke. Sometimes on a thread it smells like I am in an elevator with someone who stanks of srale tobacco smole and alcohol.

Somebody who needs a shower and a change of clothes.

At the start of the thread yiu did not understand scientifically what energy is and means and how it is used scintifically. Any exression of energy in a model or theory reduces to the SI definition.

If yiu are argung advanced theory without understand that then there is nothing to discuss.

You'll have to detail the alleged failures of other contestants before I can arbitrate. Please be concise and clear.

But I am curious about your insistence on SI units. Do you think anyone in the thread is unaware that Energy has dimension md2t-2 ?

Instead of joules or ergs, could we not use shekel-acres per squared-fortnight as our energy unit if we so chose?

For definiteness we'll use the traditional definition of a shekel mass: 180 grains of barley. As far as I know, actually calibrating weights with barleycorns has fallen into disuse; that measure is now standardized at about 64.79891 milligrams. (The Sumerian shekel, though also apparently defined as the weight of 180 barleycorns, was much lighter, a discrepancy as yet unexplained.)

#### Cheerful Charlie

##### Contributor
Sighhhh.. Faraday's field theories. Try to do competent electrical engineering without them. And as every educated sixth grader knows, with a magnet, a sheet of paper and some iron filings, we can demonstrate magnetic fields really exist. Next we use these theories to be able to create things like generators. Fields again!

#### bigfield

##### the baby-eater
Conceptional energy has no independent existence or reality.
Name something that does.

#### bilby

##### Fair dinkum thinkum
Sighhhh.. Faraday's field theories. Try to do competent electrical engineering without them. And as every educated sixth grader knows, with a magnet, a sheet of paper and some iron filings, we can demonstrate magnetic fields really exist. Next we use these theories to be able to create things like generators. Fields again!
Well even the Sumerians needed somewhere to grow their barley.

#### steve_bank

##### Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
I try not to exercise my super-Mod powers — I'm a live-and-let-live kind of guy — but some of the posts in this thread seem almost pejorative.

It is very strange. I do not drink or smoke. Sometimes on a thread it smells like I am in an elevator with someone who stanks of srale tobacco smole and alcohol.

Somebody who needs a shower and a change of clothes.

At the start of the thread yiu did not understand scientifically what energy is and means and how it is used scintifically. Any exression of energy in a model or theory reduces to the SI definition.

If yiu are argung advanced theory without understand that then there is nothing to discuss.

You'll have to detail the alleged failures of other contestants before I can arbitrate. Please be concise and clear.

But I am curious about your insistence on SI units. Do you think anyone in the thread is unaware that Energy has dimension md2t-2 ?

Instead of joules or ergs, could we not use shekel-acres per squared-fortnight as our energy unit if we so chose?

For definiteness we'll use the traditional definition of a shekel mass: 180 grains of barley. As far as I know, actually calibrating weights with barleycorns has fallen into disuse; that measure is now standardized at about 64.79891 milligrams. (The Sumerian shekel, though also apparently defined as the weight of 180 barleycorns, was much lighter, a discrepancy as yet unexplained.)
Arbitrate what?

Energy like meters, kilograms, and meters is a unit of measure defined in Systems International. Anything more than that is philosophical inter[retion or science fiction.

Anyone who has applied physical science would know that. Energy is no more mysterious than meters or seconds.

Again look how SI defines fundamental and derived units in terms of fundamental units. Do you ubdestabd the MKS system?

SI is an integrated system. In a physical equation dimensions must be consistent. You could come up with a number of ways to create a system of units of measure.

SI is useful because the meter, kilogram, and second can be derived anywhere in the world at reasonbake cost and complexity.

I beleve the kilogram standard has changed from a platinum cylinder in a Paris lab to a measurement system. That means any lab can create fundamantal measurmentt standards. And thatt enabls global technology, science, manufacturing, and commerce.

In the 90s there was a move to defund NIST as a cost saving measure, a very bad idea.

#### bigfield

##### the baby-eater
Conceptional energy has no independent existence or reality.
Name something that does.
And that is my point.
Which is what? That energy is an abstraction, a name that we use for a property in theoretical models? That we use this name for several properties (heat, kinetic energy, electron states) that appear to be equivalent?

There is certainly some mystery, or at least a cool factor, behind why there are different forms that energy can take, and that we have found many ways to convert energy from one form to another, or observe it happening in nature.

You may not want to philosophise about the nature of energy, because you're content with the fruits of past scientific achievements, but it seems to me that scientists need to philosophise about the nature of energy in order to figure out these theories in the first place.