If you have the time, I have a physics question that has been breaking my brain. What exactly is energy?
I've tried so hard to wrap my head around it but even all the engineering dads of youtube can't make me understand.
The thing with physics is that the simpler something is, the harder it is to put it into words. Energy is almost as simple as it gets. The textbook definition of energy is just "the capacity for something to move against a force," but that's not satisfying, because it's too simple. So let's try something else.
Think back to the Big Bang. What was the Big Bang made of?
Particles, right? Just a lot of particles. We didn't even have hydrogen yet, that would take about 400,000 years. In fact for the first few microseconds, we didn't even have protons and neutrons and electrons, we just had quarks and gluons. The stuff of the Big Bang - the stuff you could touch - was just particles.
Where did those particles go?
You know: into stuff. Everything around you is made of those particles. I mean, by weight, less than 1% of all matter in the universe is solid stuff, but you get it, right? The planets and the stars and dark matter and black holes and penguins and sunflowers and you and me are all made out of those particles.
But the Big Bang wasn't just "a bunch of particles." "A bunch of particles" would just...sit there. If the singularity behind the Big Bang was just a bunch of particles, it would just be, like, a marble, or a block of tofu. It wouldn't have done anything.
Part of the difficulty of understanding energy is that we thought it was a substance for so long. Like, from the time when fire was put into the same category as earth, wind, and and water as one of the classical elements, up until, like, the 1850s. And talking about it like it's a substance and thinking about it like it's a substance is a tough habit to break. But it's not a substance. The Big Bang WAS only "made of" those particles. There wasn't anything else there. Physically it was just particles.
Those particles just had personal qualities. Like having a charming personality, and a good sense of humor. Intangible qualities. Two of them, specifically.
Their qualities were hot and fast. And hot is just fast but small! So really they only had one quality: an absolutely fucking stupid amount of FAST.
We've already covered where the particles went. That's all the stuff you see when you look around.
So where did the fast go?
That's energy. The single personal intangible quality possessed by the particles at the moment of the Big Bang. And energy can never be created or destroyed, right? So the fast isn't gone. All of the particles had fast, and so when they spread out, they took the fast with them, as they turned into atoms and chemicals and stuff.
All of the energy in the universe is just the fastness from that single moment of ignition, transforming and transforming into different expressions of motion.
Hope this helps.
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