The late Richard Feyman, a well respected physicist said ” It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is” There are so many diverse forms of energy, many with their own units that the same man also said ” For those who want some proof that physicists are human, the proof is in the idiocy of all the different units which they use for measuring energy”.
These blogs on energy intend to convince you that everything in this universe of ours is energy or space. The commonality of all energy is that it is alive and proactive at the sub atomic level. Understand energy and, along with many other things, you understand the reason we humans exist.
The source of human energy is the food we eat and we get it from plants and animals. Stop eating and we become weak, lack energy and die. Humans, like all animals need energy and they get it by eating animals and plants. Almost all of our energy needs ultimately come from plant structures that get the energies they need from the sun.
The atomic structures that make for we humans, all animals and plants are all structures of energy. Our energy needs are the energy needs of our atomic particles. When we die the particle energies that were us live on getting their energy needs in other non living and living forms. I use the term “living” to describe the energies of what science describes as living and I include a blog in this series on living energy. Even so you might find that I will often refer to inanimate objects as living because there are many definitions of life and mine includes anything that is proactive and therefore everything in our universe.
Humans have on demand electrical energy supplies that come to our homes and places of work. Such energies originate in coal or nuclear power stations or come from renewable sources, like wind and solar power. Electricity is a form of energy that is not well understood and if you are interested my blog on electrical and magnetic energy will make it clear what it is and how it works.
We burn gas in our homes to provide energy for cooking and heating and burn fuel in the engines of cars and other modes of transport to provide the energies that move us more rapidly from place to place. Burning is a chemical process that releases energy and my blog on chemical energy deals with it, in more detail but also with nuclear change and states of matter changes.
We cannot create nor can we destroy energy. In all of the processes that we might call energy production, energy particles are only doing what they want to do. We simply provide the conditions and they proactively do the rest. In burning operations the particles of structures are simply taking the opportunity to come together in more energy efficient arrangements and releasing energies that they no longer need. Nuclear power is again one where we provide the environment and nuclear particles proactively do what is best for them.
Wind turbines rotate because their particles want away from the particles of the wind. It is essential to realise that no contacts are ever made between energy particles. All particle energy actions are proactive and in consideration of their environment as conveyed to them by photon energies. Photon energies are the food of the particle energy world. They are a range of energies that are generally tiny in comparison to particle energies and the tinier ones are mostly sort after by particles but not excessively so.
Our sun is a major source of energy. It radiates, in one second photons of energy that would power the USA for nine million years. Its energy coming to earth in 6 months is more than the energy we could ever hope to get from earth’s resources. Every second, in full sun, each square centimetre of earth’s particle surface attracts about a million trillion sun emitted photons to it. You can discover more about the energies of photons in my page on radiated energy. In solar cells the sun provides the photon energy that leads to “want away from one another” electron actions that we use as electrical energy.
Yet despite all that sun energy, the ways in which we make energy available for our use threaten our existence. The burning of fossil fuels adds to the carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere. Its presence there returns more earth emitted energies back to earth’s particles. The return energy is why we call it a greenhouse gas. It is a substantial cause of global warming.
Deforestation is responsible for about 10% of global warming . Trees, like plants, are carbohydrate energy structures. They take carbon dioxide from our atmosphere and release oxygen into it in a process that uses the sun’s energy to build their energy structures. Carbohydrates and oxygen may be what we need to survive and carbon dioxide may threaten our existence but the world economy is unstoppable.
Most scientists do not regard energy as a reality. There are many definitions of it but the science ones usually describe it as a quantitative property and associate it with the doing of work. Some scientists recognise it as a mathematical construct enabling energy calculations. At school you probably encountered what science call the two types of energy, potential and kinetic. My blog on motion energy will explain how both are a misunderstanding of what is really going on, why the calculations that use them work but thereby add to the confusion about what energy is.
Photon energies radiate through space within particle structures or from particle structure to particle structure, at light speed. Albert Einstein’s famous E = mc2 linked mass, our measure of a structure’s matter, to energy but science has it that photons have no mass. Confusingly Einstein also told us that when photons are released from a structure it is at the expense of that structure’s mass.
A supposedly inanimate rock is composed of particle nodes of energy with photon links between them. It also has photon energy links to and desires for the earth and its emitted energies beneath it and to the sun above it and to other objects in its surround. Do its particles simply react to photon energies or do they proactively interact with them? My living view of particles has it 100 percent the latter.
Solid, liquid and gaseous structures aren’t as we see or feel them. They are composed of neutron, proton and electron particles that are energy nodes in space which have come together to satisfy their energy desires efficiently. Such particles take up less than 0.00001% of the space in the structure they occupy. Their needs for photon energies is what binds them together but those needs are limited and have to be controlled. It is why nucleons hold electrons at a distance. I say again, we don’t see or feel solid, liquid and gaseous structures. What we see is linked to the photon energies that come to our eyes from them. What we feel as contacts and forces are related to the photon interactions that come to play when our particles are near an object’s particles. If you want to you can find out more about particles in my blog on particle energies.
Consider the earth itself as being zillions upon zillions of particles interacting in vast amounts of space. Each particle in it has a little freedom of movement and can respond proactively to the photon energies coming its way. It’s particles are aware of and desire photons coming from the sun and they vibrate toward them but then away from them when they have more than satisfied that desire. Can you see how earth’s motion toward the sun as in its orbit is the result of its vast numbers of individual particle desires for the energies of space, Such is the nature of gravity and it applies to our particles and their desire for earth emitted energies. Particles that proactively interact with photons is discussed in my blog on Forces and Gravity.