Understanding the Composition of Energy

[quantumcarl]

Maybe I'm getting it even more now!

When Albert Einstein came up with 'E=Mc^2' he basically said that mass and the speed of light (squared for some reason?) contains information that can be called energy.

For instance Dr. Einstein said: when the mass and the speed that is represented by a hammer (and a carpenter wielding the hammer) hits a nail, the information that is the mass and speed of the hammer is transferred into the nail.

The nail then reacts according to the information being transferred from the hammer and its condition of speed and mass and the transfer is transformed into the action of the nail (which is "controled" by the conditions surrounding the nail).

So, energy could be represented as "being made of" the information generated by mass and velocity (at any scale... as pivoxa15 and others have pointed out).

Thank you all for hammering that home!

 

[vanesch]

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.

Ok then, so "money" is made of bills, coins, and charges on CMOS capacitors in bank computers.

Mmm, and I'm forgetting: some Poynting vectors in transmission lines too.

Hell, money seems to be essentially of electromagnetic origin, with a slight fermionic content, just like the universe

Unless we're forgetting 95% of "dark money" of course

 

[selfAdjoint]

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!

 

[quantumcarl]

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!

Heinlein wrote some creepy stuff. Now we get to live it!

If the universe suddenly converted to a "paper" monetary system then the energy we get from the sun would be in the form of greenbacks and we'd all starve.

Otherwise, as it is, we get green leaves and wheatfields etc...

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There's a few other aspects of energy unsolved for me as yet.

For instance...

Storage of energy? Batteries can store the mass and motion of a waterfall or of windmills?

This involves transfering the information generated by (the mass and motion inherent in) a waterfall in the form of excited electrons, through a wire to a "rechargable battery". This battery is then somehow capable of "storing" a portion of the information about the mass and motion of a waterfall.

Then someone can transfer that information about the waterfall which is contained in the battery to a source of light, sound heat or another motion.

How is this possible?

 

[masudr]

Seriously: chill out about energy. Use the notion of energy in solving physics problems if you think it'll help. That's all there is to it.

Assigning reality to a human mathematical construct is overdoing it already; and here you're trying to develop a complicated set of unnecessary analogies. This is what I would call over-the-top.

 

[Farsight]

quantumcarl: Energy is pushing. Or pulling. Take your pick. You can push on a spring. Or you can pull on elastic. Or you can push a mass through space. Which is maybe pulling a bit of space into time. Or vice versa. Whatever. But if the pushing or pulling makes something happen, that's called motion. And if it don't, that's called tension. If you have too much tension, something usually snaps then something big happens. Simple really!



Now, what's pushing made out of?

 

[Doc Al]

quantumcarl: Energy is pushing. Or pulling.

This thread is confused enough without conflating force (pushing and pulling) with energy.