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quantumcarl
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Can anyone please tell me what energy is made of? If this is a really bad question please feel free to eliminate this thread... sorry to bother!
eep said:Why do some teachers always tell me that energy is simply a mathematical quantity that we use to help calculate things? It seems to me that energy is much more fundamental than that. Perhaps energy is the purest component you can ever get. That is, energy is not made up of anything else.
from:http://www.webelements.com/webelements/scholar/elements/gold/compounds.htmlFluorides
Formula Data
AuF3
name: gold (III) fluoride
formula weight: 253.962
formal oxidation number of Au: 3
AuF5
name: gold (V) fluoride
formula weight: 291.959
formal oxidation number of Au: 5
Chlorides
Formula Data
AuCl
name: gold (I) chloride
formula weight: 232.419
formal oxidation number of Au: 1
AuCl3
name: gold (III) chloride
formula weight: 303.325
formal oxidation number of Au: 3
Bromides
Formula Data
AuBr
name: gold (I) bromide
formula weight: 276.871
formal oxidation number of Au: 1
AuBr3
name: gold (III) bromide
formula weight: 436.679
formal oxidation number of Au: 3
Iodides
Formula Data
AuI
name: gold (I) iodide
formula weight: 323.871
formal oxidation number of Au: 1
AuI3
name: gold (III) iodide
formula weight: 577.68
formal oxidation number of Au: 3
Oxides
Formula Data
Au2O3
name: gold (III) oxide
formula weight: 441.931
formal oxidation number of Au: 3
no hydrides of gold
jtbell said:Energy is a property of a system, not a substance with an independent existence. You might as well ask "what is length made of?" or "what is momentum made of?"
ZapperZ said:This is because meaningless question will give you meaningless answer that doesn't add to your understanding of what is being studied.
Zz.
Goethe said:Man is not born to solve the problems of the universe, but to find out where the problems begin, and then to take his stand within the limits of the intelligible
Feynman said:In order to talk to each other, we have to have words, and that's all right. It's a good idea to try to see the difference, and it's a good idea to know when we are teaching the tools of science, such as words, and when we are teaching science itself.
To make my point still clearer, I shall pick out a certain science book to criticize unfavorably, which is unfair, because I am sure that with little ingenuity, I can find equally unfavorable things to say about others. There is a first grade science book which, in the first lesson of the first grade, begins in an unfortunate manner to teach science, because it starts off an the wrong idea of what science is. There is a picture of a dog--a windable toy dog--and a hand comes to the winder, and then the dog is able to move. Under the last picture, it says "What makes it move?" Later on, there is a picture of a real dog and the question, "What makes it move?" Then there is a picture of a motorbike and the question, "What makes it move?" and so on.
I thought at first they were getting ready to tell what science was going to be about--physics, biology, chemistry--but that wasn't it. The answer was in the teacher's edition of the book: the answer I was trying to learn is that "energy makes it move."
Now, energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right. What I meant is that it is not easy to understand energy well enough to use it right, so that you can deduce something correctly using the energy idea--it is beyond the first grade. It would be equally well to say that "God makes it move," or "spirit makes it move," or "movability makes it move." (In fact, one could equally well say "energy makes it stop.")
Look at it this way: that’s only the definition of energy; it should be reversed. We might say when something can move that it has energy in it, but not what makes it move is energy. This is a very subtle difference. It's the same with this inertia proposition.
Perhaps I can make the difference a little clearer this way: If you ask a child what makes the toy dog move, you should think about what an ordinary human being would answer. The answer is that you wound up the spring; it tries to unwind and pushes the gear around.
What a good way to begin a science course! Take apart the toy; see how it works. See the cleverness of the gears; see the ratchets. Learn something about the toy, the way the toy is put together, the ingenuity of people devising the ratchets and other things. That's good. The question is fine. The answer is a little unfortunate, because what they were trying to do is teach a definition of what is energy. But nothing whatever is learned.
Suppose a student would say, "I don't think energy makes it move." Where does the discussion go from there?
I finally figured out a way to test whether you have taught an idea or you have only taught a definition.
Test it this way: you say, "Without using the new word which you have just learned, try to rephrase what you have just learned in your own language." Without using the word "energy," tell me what you know now about the dog's motion." You cannot. So you learned nothing about science. That may be all right. You may not want to learn something about science right away. You have to learn definitions. But for the very first lesson, is that not possibly destructive?
I think for lesson number one, to learn a mystic formula for answering questions is very bad. The book has some others: "gravity makes it fall;" "the soles of your shoes wear out because of friction." Shoe leather wears out because it rubs against the sidewalk and the little notches and bumps on the sidewalk grab pieces and pull them off. To simply say it is because of friction, is sad, because it's not science.
xXPhoenixFireXx said:Not a bad question at all.
I don't think anyone really knows. Someone I knew said energy might be the manefesation of a certain configuration of space-time and the limited set of rules it can go to change. But then what is space made of?
Eventually it's going to boil down to something fundamental that isn't made up of anything else but itself.
So in short energy is made up of energy. You've got to stop somewhere.
quantumcarl said:My question only seems meaningless if the meaning of my question escapes you as it does me. The meaning of my inquiry escapes me and that is the motivation behind my inquiry.
Are there other examples of properties whose origin and composition are a mystery?
How else can I ask "what is energy made of and where does it come from? Is it taboo to ask this sort of question? Is it impossible to answer? Or is it as ridiculous as asking "what are the origins of nature?"
One thing I can assure anyone of is that I am not leading you toward a sermon on the nature of metaphysics or the futility of the study of physics. I am simply finding out if there have been any studies on the nature of the origin of energy.
PS. I have a feeling I've posted the wrong formula for the composition of gold. If so, please ignore the post!
quantumcarl said:Are there other examples of properties whose origin and composition are a mystery?
quantumcarl said:My question only seems meaningless if the meaning of my question escapes you as it does me. The meaning of my inquiry escapes me and that is the motivation behind my inquiry.
vanesch said:I concur with Zz about the meaninglessness of the question (in the sense that he explained: not a criticism). The question "what is energy made of" implies several premisses that are not true. The question "what is X made of" has a meaning in the following sense: X can be seen as a collection of other things Y in a certain structure, of more fundamental nature, such that by considering things Y together, we understand aspects of the behaviour/appearance... of X.
This is what happens when you say that cars are made of mechanical and electronic pieces of equipment, that wood is made of organic fibres, that a block of iron is made of iron atoms...
But this hierarchical structure does not always hold, for all concepts, and for these concepts, the question then becomes meaningless, like: "what's the CPU clock speed of a bucket of water" or something.
Now, maybe one day we might have a formulation of nature in which, what we now call "energy" is in the end, represented by a hierarchical structure of some kind, and then the question might have a meaning. Or maybe not. But, energy being a *theoretical concept*, its only existence being made up of its theoretical definition, and not corresponding to something "out there", as it stands, as a theoretical concept, it has not more meaning to ask "what is energy made of" than to ask "what is diameter made of".
But, energy being a *theoretical concept*, its only existence being made up of its theoretical definition, and not corresponding to something "out there", as it stands, as a theoretical concept, it has not more meaning to ask "what is energy made of" than to ask "what is diameter made of"
I prefer the "energy is a property" idea.xXPhoenixFireXx said:Eventually it's going to boil down to something fundamental that isn't made up of anything else but itself.
So in short energy is made up of energy. You've got to stop somewhere.
eep said:I really like the "energy is a property of the system" answer. That really does explain it best.
quantumcarl said:Is this similar to the measurment of other things like light in "photons"... gravity in "gravitons"? Is this all theoretical terminology and nothing more? Ee ghads.
vanesch said:In order even to say that you "measured an energy", you need a theoretical interpretation of your measurement.
(and yes, photons and all that, you also need a theoretical interpretation).
quantumcarl said:Can anyone please tell me what energy is made of?
quantumcarl said:If energy is a physical property does that mean energy itself is physical or is it an aphysical, theoretical property of a physical condition?
pivoxa15 said:In many ways energy is like money and has been described this way in physics textbooks like Halliday&Resnick. Would you ask what money is made of? Asking that question shows you have no understanding of money for it is used to keep a quantitative check on resourse allocation.
vanesch said:The problem with that analogy is that you could naively say that money "is made up of coins and bills" :tongue2:
selfAdjoint said:Not for a century and more. Even Marx knew better. It's made up of transfers between accounts. Physical currency is just a convenience, a very small portion of the money supply.
selfAdjoint said:Not for a century and more. Even Marx knew better. It's made up of transfers between accounts. Physical currency is just a convenience, a very small portion of the money supply.
selfAdjoint said:Money is a social abstraction; "An honest man's promise to pay" (from Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon, a story about an online real-time computer controlled economy written in 1939. The hero creates electronic games!