Conversation

🦉in the wilderless
@the_wilderless
Every type of energy was just “x moving,” Which seemed to make it clear that energy was whatever was *causing* these various things to move, But I couldn’t find anything on what it was that caused this.
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🦉in the wilderless
@the_wilderless
I finally found some physics prof giving a class where he just admitted freely “we have no idea what energy is, it’s just a word to describe some stuff we can observe and use”
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
are you familiar with the hamiltonian approach to classical (and quantum) mechanics? from that pov "energy" is anything that shows up as a term in a special observable called the hamiltonian, and the hamiltonian is the thing that makes classical systems change over time
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🦉in the wilderless
@the_wilderless
Not familiar—correct me if I’m wrong, that seems like another passing the buck, right? Energy is whatever this x is that causes systems to change—and this says nothing about what x’s actual qualities are, just what x does?
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🦉in the wilderless
@the_wilderless
Replying to
@QiaochuYuan
It’s more that culturally I’d been led to believe at that point that Energy was a “thing” that was understood and catalogued—and it was odd to find that it was basically just a useful term for our observations about a phenomena that we don’t understand
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