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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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
to be more specific, it's differences in energy between different states that make change possible. if the energy of every state is the same then no change occurs. so... i guess it wouldn't be too inaccurate to say that "energy (difference) is the capacity for change"
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🦉in the wilderless
@the_wilderless
Ah, this part I’ve run across a lot, yeah. This one always did my head in cuz it seems paradoxically like energy is A) the universes way of changing, and B) just another name for the universe’s drive to become uniform, unchanging
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