Late-night ontological energy crisis. posted 7/20/2007 12:23:50 AM | 1 kudo what's this?     report abuse tagged: energy, physics, metaphysics

Monsterboy

I was out just now for a gallon of milk when I started to think about energy. Specifically, I wondered, not for the first time, if there's any such thing. I mean, a real thing. Or is it just a convenient descriptor we give to the way the world works?

(Maybe this is one for Null or that evil twin of his. )

Now, it seems perfectly intuitive that there's energy -- we see it at work all the time. We can measure it. It's worked into all the big equations of What It's All About Really that only 5 people in the world can read (or so they day. Hmm...).

But I can't help but think... is it, really? Is there any there there? Two rocks collide. We say they've exchanged energy. But isn't it just that when one rock pushes another, it slows down and the other one moves some? We have a phenomenon, and we give it a name: "energy transfer". But the difference between this name and, say, "tactikinesis" or something is, there's this noun, "energy", that's ostensibly being transfered.

Show it to me.

I mean, light is energy. We can see that. Electricity is energy. We can feel it. And like I said, we can measure it. But. Something seems dreadfully unkosher to me. These observable phenomena, light, electricity, are related somehow; they can be transformed form one to the other. But does the classification under which they're lumped really mean anything, or is it a mathematical and rhetorical convenience?

Let me coin a term: "energism." Let's compare this to an already existing term: "vitalism". Now, vitalism refers to the philosophy that there is a nebulous "life force" that animated living matter. This has been superseded by the position that it's all just regular old chemistry, and that "organic chemistry" is just the chemistry of carbon.

Can it be that energism is much the same? It's awfully convenient to talk of energy as if it's this substance that can take on different forms. But is electricity anything more a specific motion of electrons? Motion is not, after all, a thing, is it? It's just what an object happens to be doing. A mode of existence, really. Throw a ball, and are you imparting energy to it, or are you just forcing it to move becasue the atoms of your hand won't let it stay still, and that the atoms of the air and eventually ground take awhile to brake it? Is it just a name for how things work?

But it looks so rational on paper. There are very precise, predictively valid formulae for figuring how much energy it take to do what. But does the ability to measure something mean that it's real?

As I read that, it looks like something someone might say after taking some expensive hallucinogens. But that's another example of looks being deceptive. Lt me give an example: the dollar.

I'll always be a capitalist, becasue I love money. Not having it -- or I'd certainly be making more if it. No, i love the idea of money, because it's a direct, practical, everyday manifestation of a metaphysical concept. Time was, you see, when a dollar was a note that stood for a certain definite, though variable, amount of gold. Time was, you could take your dollar to the U.S. Treasury and exchange it for a dollar's worth of gold. Granted, the gold itself was still subject to the whimsical concept of "value", but the money had a basis.

Nowadays, a dollar is worth a dollar pretty much because everyone agrees it is. (Shh. If this got out weird economic things would happen. Let's keep it to you few readers of my blog.)

We can measure a dollar. We have complicated rules for how and when it can multiply, how much it can by, we have hard-numbers descriptors and big latin-based words for its growth and shrinkage. But many, if not the majority, of them exist only as concepts, "commodity dollars". You earn X number of dollars from work and if you're like most people all you get is an electronic stub saying that this is true. And therefore it is! Even if you have hard cash, you don't have any dollars -- you just have notes testifying that that amount of dollars is, in some nonmaterial way, yours.

So I want to know. Is energy for real? Oris it a number-dance? A highly reliable and convenient number-dance, certainly, but is it the word merely giving apparent concreteness to what is in fact entirely an abstraction?

Now, I'm fine with energy being a convenient abstraction, if that's what it is. But why don't people act like it?

The milk, incidentally, was $3.39. Cheapest price around here.

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Blogs by Monsterboy: Grace vs. Folklore, Revisited The end of an era. Pan's Labrynth Crush update Vote for Me! Because you're an idiot! Grace takes on folklore Congratulations indeed. Birthday comes early this year. Enlightenment The Birthday Massacre Well, this is a first. Death by Stereo Late-night ontological energy crisis. Ow ow, ow-ow-ow If I am ever supreme dictator... first date "I got your back, but stay outta my face." Interesting developments Happy 4th. My day. Night owl genes Anyone else find it ironic... "That's very libertarian of you, Sweetie." Great evening. Overheard while IMing This relationship brought to you by .38 Special.