What exactly is energy in terms of space etc.?

Question

I don't get it. This makes no sense. I've taken chemistry, physics and biology and I still don't have a grasp on it. Is it an element? Like when you turn a stove on and it heats up, it needs "energy" but what element is made out of? Hydrogen? Or maybe just photons? When an electron jumps an orbital, what is energy? Is it like gravity or something? Energy from the sun is _______?

"A thermodynamic quantity equivalent to the capacity of a physical system to do work; the units of energy are joules."

"A scalar physical quantity that is a property of objects and systems which is conserved by nature. Energy is often defined as the ability to do work."

Also what does an electric field's gravity look like?

Answer 1

'in terms of space' is misleading as h**l.

energy is the ability to do work. there are lots of types of energy - electrical, kinetic, potential. energy can be transferred, or changed into another type, but cannot be created or lost.

easiest way to think is in chemistry - you get energy values per mole for everything , that is , when you burn a certain amount of that substance you always get the same amount of energy out of it.

Answer 2

You sound like an idiot.

Answer 3

You've taken physics and you don't understand energy?

You flunked didn't you?

Answer 4

energy is the thing that we will never understand completely.  i go through the same problems.  we know how to make it and use it, but we dont know why it was made that way and we dont know what exactly it is.  we will never understand why me hitting something will make it move.  bc it has energy, but still why does it.  how does it go from place to place?  we will never know

Answer 5

Energy is not a substance or element or any material thing. It has no mass and no gravity and it not made of any element. It cannot be created or destroyed; only changed from one form to another. Energy and matter are completely different. However, Einstein's famous equation E=MC^2 says that energy can be converted into mass and mass can be converted to energy. That equation doesn't say HOW to convert it, but it tells you how much you get if you can figure out how to convert it.

Energy is the capacity to do work. It is an almost spiritual kind of thing, not material or anything you can touch or hold. Like the joy or anger. Joy and anger are not material things, and neither is energy.

You may be confused because the news media talk about oil as if it were energy. It is not. It is "fuel". Fuel is matter than can be used to change energy from one form to another. Oil molecules are chemically combined with oxygen from the air in a process called fire to rearrange the atoms into different molecules and release some of the energy that holds the oil molecule together.

Answer 6

Your second quote pretty much sums it up.  "Energy is a scalar physical quantity that is a property of objects and systems which is conserved by nature".  Indeed, people often have trouble with the idea of energy since it is largely a mathematical notion.  Emmy Noether's theorem demonstrates that certain quantities are always conserved based on certain properties of space.  For example, in our current case of energy, the conservation of the scalar quantity named energy can be derived from the time invariance of the laws of physics (i.e. the laws of physics do not change with time).  I'll give you a link to the wikipedia article about Noether's theorem (actually, this page demonstrates the conservation of energy as a example), however I will warn you that it is really quite mathematically complex, so unless you are comfortable with the level of mathematics presented, it might be difficult to follow.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s...

As for your second question about the "gravity" of the electric field, this is actually a subtle point.  To find the answer, you have to look into General Relativity.  Einstein's field equation relate the Einstein tensor (which is related to the "curvature" of spacetime) to the energy present.  It is possible to derive what is called an energy-momentum tensor for the electromagnetic field.  When this is used in the field equations, it demonstrates that thelectromagneticic field causes a non-zero curvature of spacetime.  For more details:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_fi...

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s...