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
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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🦉in the wilderless
@the_wilderless
This was back in my coming-out-of-rational-materialism phase, so it was just one more drop in the bucket of “ooooh, these people are pretending to understand way more than they do, cuz they like holding cultural power. Shit, I thought they knew everything.”
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