What We Get Wrong About Energy

People interested in the scientific understanding of energy either already know what it is or can easily find out in our modern world. Consider Richard Feynman, who writes quite plainly in his lectures that science doesn't know what energy is, but has learned how to identify a number that can be calculated for any system. You can't obtain pure energy by scientific means or touch it: it isn't a substance, and it doesn't exist in a form we're familiar with.

Our perception of energy goes no further than the energy carriers we use: oil, electricity, heat, and so on. It's only through those carriers that we understand what energy is.

The truth is, words convey meaning very poorly: we each perceive things in our own way, so words aren't up to the job. Images do it better: they're limited to the essence of whatever we're exploring.

Let's take an image to explore: imagine a person as a mobile phone. A person would have something like a battery and need the equivalent of a charger. Say food, sleep, and oxygen are what charge us, and when we act without food, sleep, and oxygen… Wait, we can't act without oxygen, so we're always charging, on oxygen. That means our battery is meant to be used without oxygen. But the average person can run on battery power only while holding their breath, and that's about a minute. There are records, of course, but we're using average figures.

So the phrase "I have no energy" is scientifically incorrect. If we're acting, we have energy. But we do get the feeling that we don't want to act, and we explain it as a lack of energy. We say we have no strength left, and it feels as if the energy is going somewhere. We might suppose it goes into stress, a lack of happiness, and endless constraints.

But if something suddenly happens that meets a need of ours, we immediately have energy. An interesting idea comes to mind, and we're already fired up to make it happen. A moment earlier, we felt drained. A phone call, a message with good news for us, and in that very instant the feeling of tiredness and exhaustion disappears.

How does that work? We haven't eaten, the temperature hasn't changed, there's no more oxygen, yet we feel charged up. By analogy, a phone that's almost out of charge receives a message and is instantly charged. It sounds implausible, but that's exactly what happens to our sense of how charged up we are. It feels like magic, and as Isaac Asimov put it: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

It looks magical because the nature of energy is unknown. Now let's set aside the details and accept this as the essence of energy:

"The force that makes the existence of anything possible is called energy."

So we need to set energy carriers aside for a while and focus on the simple fact that something exists. Matter contains energy in all its states: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma.

Any thought in your head, even if it exists only in your head and only briefly, is energy. It shows up somehow in how the brain works and has something to do with neurons, but that's not the point. What matters is that the brain needs about the same amount of energy to picture an elephant as it does to picture an ant. Yet the image itself affects how we feel and how we experience reality. Everything we feel, whether it's music, nature, beauty, love, or hatred, is energy.

Esoteric practitioners have made a cult of energy, as if they alone could feel it. But hang on: on that view, only esoteric practitioners should be able to feel the intangible sensations we experience. Yet music, love, and hatred go back tens of thousands of years. Anyone who can appreciate art in any form feels energy.

And by analogy with science, some energies suit us. Take the temperature range in which we can live comfortably. The same energy at a different concentration can kill us or make our lives uncomfortable. A very simple piece of advice: go where you feel comfortable, and don't go where the concentration of energy makes you uncomfortable.