Energy is Not a ‘Thing’
A couple of days ago I had a conversation with someone who expressed that she thought certain places have a ‘positive’ or a ‘negative energy’, and while she soon accepted that this was just a semantic trick and a figure of speech, it got me thinking that this may be a common misunderstanding. So to clear matters up let’s talk a little about what energy really is, and more importantly, what it consequently is not.
To explain this in a way that people can easily grasp, let’s think of the colour red. Now red is, of course, a colour, just like blue, green and any number of colours, but it is not a thing in and of itself. The sentence; “That is a red.” doesn’t make sense on any level. Rather, we use ‘red’ to describe the property of something else. “That is a red car” or “she was wearing a red dress” for instance makes perfect logical and linguistic sense.
And in the same way, energy is not a thing in and of itself; it is a property that something else has to some degree or another. There are several ways of describing this in scientific terms.
For instance, you have the ‘potential energy’ that is the result of everything seeking* as low an energy state as possible, and is best illustrated by, say, a ball lying on a shelf. Now, if you push that ball over the edge, the fact that it falls to the floor is the equivalent of the release of that potential energy. Potential energy is all about the effects of gravity which means that the ball in question would have less potential energy if, for some reason, it was placed on a shelf on the Moon where gravity is about one sixth of what it is on Earth. Conversely a heavier ball would have more potential energy, as would one placed on a higher shelf.
Another type of energy is what we call ‘chemical energy’ which basically comes down to any type of chemical reaction that releases a surplus of energy that can be transferred to something else. Gasoline possesses chemical energy and so does the food that you eat every day, and in both cases, through the interaction with oxygen, you get the ‘burning’ of certain chemicals which in their transition to other compounds release energy that can be put to work. In the body that chemical energy is stored in carbohydrates (including sugars), lipids (fat), and proteins of various kinds.
Often we also consider ‘nuclear energy’ as a type of energy of its own, and while every atom in the universe possesses nuclear energy, the most well known example of this is the process we call fission. Fission is what we do in nuclear plants and it works best on fairly instable atoms called isotopes, usually Uranium 235 or Plutonium 239. The splitting of these atoms releases that nuclear energy into other forms of energy that is again possessed by various mediums around it.
Then there is ‘kinetic energy’ or as it is sometimes called; ‘motion energy’. When you kick a football you are transferring kinetic energy to the ball that makes it fly across the field. Due to friction that kinetic energy is again transferred to the air around it, and unless you kick it hard enough to achieve escape velocity, it is going to fall down on the ground, where it again transfers kinetic energy to the grass until it comes to a full stop. Anything that moves has kinetic energy, be it bullets, cars, footballs and even light.
Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t talked about ‘heat energy’ yet, and there is a good reason for that. Heat, warmth, temperature or what you wish to call it, is in fact the same as kinetic energy. When we heat something up, say a kettle full of water, what we in essence are doing is that we’re making the water molecules move around faster. And as it gets hotter, some of these molecules will attain enough momentum so that they will be released from the weak bonds that hold them together with the other water molecules, and they will take off in the form of steam. This also explains why chemical reactions generally work faster at higher temperatures; the molecules are moving around at a more frantic pace and thus they are more likely to come into contact with each other to facilitate the reaction, and it also explains why there is such a thing as absolute zero. Absolute zero, defined respectively as 0 degrees Kelvin, minus 273.15 degrees Celsius or minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit, is the point in which no molecular movement takes place, which means that the molecules possess no kinetic energy.
So, to sum up, in science the term energy is, like the colour red, not a thing in and of itself. Rather it is a property that something else possesses, and which is used to describe the state in which something finds itself. As you may or may not have recognized, this is all a part of the fifth grade science curriculum, but I suspect that many people either didn’t get a good enough explanation for how it actually works, or that they’ve simply forgotten it over time.
In either case I hope that when some new-age bullshit peddler tells you that the crystals he is selling has a “positive energy” you will know exactly why what he is telling you is pure and utter nonsense.
Energy is not a 'thing' that you can pick up and handle.
*'Seeking' in this case does not mean that it acts with conscious intent. It is merely an analogous way of describing the physical properties of something.
To explain this in a way that people can easily grasp, let’s think of the colour red. Now red is, of course, a colour, just like blue, green and any number of colours, but it is not a thing in and of itself. The sentence; “That is a red.” doesn’t make sense on any level. Rather, we use ‘red’ to describe the property of something else. “That is a red car” or “she was wearing a red dress” for instance makes perfect logical and linguistic sense.
And in the same way, energy is not a thing in and of itself; it is a property that something else has to some degree or another. There are several ways of describing this in scientific terms.
For instance, you have the ‘potential energy’ that is the result of everything seeking* as low an energy state as possible, and is best illustrated by, say, a ball lying on a shelf. Now, if you push that ball over the edge, the fact that it falls to the floor is the equivalent of the release of that potential energy. Potential energy is all about the effects of gravity which means that the ball in question would have less potential energy if, for some reason, it was placed on a shelf on the Moon where gravity is about one sixth of what it is on Earth. Conversely a heavier ball would have more potential energy, as would one placed on a higher shelf.
Another type of energy is what we call ‘chemical energy’ which basically comes down to any type of chemical reaction that releases a surplus of energy that can be transferred to something else. Gasoline possesses chemical energy and so does the food that you eat every day, and in both cases, through the interaction with oxygen, you get the ‘burning’ of certain chemicals which in their transition to other compounds release energy that can be put to work. In the body that chemical energy is stored in carbohydrates (including sugars), lipids (fat), and proteins of various kinds.
Often we also consider ‘nuclear energy’ as a type of energy of its own, and while every atom in the universe possesses nuclear energy, the most well known example of this is the process we call fission. Fission is what we do in nuclear plants and it works best on fairly instable atoms called isotopes, usually Uranium 235 or Plutonium 239. The splitting of these atoms releases that nuclear energy into other forms of energy that is again possessed by various mediums around it.
Then there is ‘kinetic energy’ or as it is sometimes called; ‘motion energy’. When you kick a football you are transferring kinetic energy to the ball that makes it fly across the field. Due to friction that kinetic energy is again transferred to the air around it, and unless you kick it hard enough to achieve escape velocity, it is going to fall down on the ground, where it again transfers kinetic energy to the grass until it comes to a full stop. Anything that moves has kinetic energy, be it bullets, cars, footballs and even light.
Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t talked about ‘heat energy’ yet, and there is a good reason for that. Heat, warmth, temperature or what you wish to call it, is in fact the same as kinetic energy. When we heat something up, say a kettle full of water, what we in essence are doing is that we’re making the water molecules move around faster. And as it gets hotter, some of these molecules will attain enough momentum so that they will be released from the weak bonds that hold them together with the other water molecules, and they will take off in the form of steam. This also explains why chemical reactions generally work faster at higher temperatures; the molecules are moving around at a more frantic pace and thus they are more likely to come into contact with each other to facilitate the reaction, and it also explains why there is such a thing as absolute zero. Absolute zero, defined respectively as 0 degrees Kelvin, minus 273.15 degrees Celsius or minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit, is the point in which no molecular movement takes place, which means that the molecules possess no kinetic energy.
So, to sum up, in science the term energy is, like the colour red, not a thing in and of itself. Rather it is a property that something else possesses, and which is used to describe the state in which something finds itself. As you may or may not have recognized, this is all a part of the fifth grade science curriculum, but I suspect that many people either didn’t get a good enough explanation for how it actually works, or that they’ve simply forgotten it over time.
In either case I hope that when some new-age bullshit peddler tells you that the crystals he is selling has a “positive energy” you will know exactly why what he is telling you is pure and utter nonsense.
Energy is not a 'thing' that you can pick up and handle.
*'Seeking' in this case does not mean that it acts with conscious intent. It is merely an analogous way of describing the physical properties of something.