Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What is Energy?

Episode Date: June 21, 2022

Daniel and Jorge tackle some of one of the simplest but trickiest concepts in physics.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I did. I just finished the banana, actually. And is that banana? enough energy to power you for a whole hour. Depends on what I'm doing that hour, you know. Procrastination doesn't take much energy. Well, it's amazing to me that you can turn bananas into physics podcasts. That amazes you as a physicist? Isn't all energy conserved?

Shouldn't it be possible from a physics point of view? Yeah, it might even be possible to do the opposite, right, to turn physics podcasts back into bananas. What? Wouldn't that violate the laws? I don't know, of physics. Because imagine all those thousands of people out there with this podcast turning this into a banana. There must be some loss, though.

I think they would end up with a smaller banana than the one you started with. Or an overly ripe banana maybe. That's a good way to describe our podcast maybe. You can think of iHeart Media as basically amplifying your original banana. That's bananas, Daniel. At least you're feeding your mind as well as your body. Hi, I'm Horham, a cartoonist and the creator of Ph.D. Comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle of physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I am sending you all physics energy.

Physics vibes. For knowledge, is knowledge energy, Daniel? There's a question about whether information has mass. So if it does, the information would have energy. And knowledge is information. So in some weird theories of the universe, maybe it does. Wait, what? Information might have mass? So all those people listening to this, we're increasing their mass. Only if we actually put some information into this podcast.

So far, it's just 100% banana jokes. It's like cholesterol, you know? There's good information and there's bad information. Which one is healthier for you? Scientists are still debating it. Stay tuned as they gather more information to answer this question. But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of IHeard Radio. In which we try to sift through all the information humanity has gathered about the crazy universe that's out there.

We try to systematize, we try to organize, we try to educate you on what we do know and what we don't know about this crazy universe, how it works, how things slosh and flow around, how it comes together to make this incredible, beautiful, and dangerous universe that we all love. Wait, are you saying that our job here is to take everything that's beautiful in the universe, chew it up, eat it, and then regurgitate it back to people as information, edible information? I'm not sure which side it comes out, but yeah, we consume it and then produce it. It's not a pretty picture either way, is it? I like to think of it as all part of the information food web. You know, don't think so much about who is eating who as much as, you know, information is flowing from person to person. We're all just stardust and predigested information. Yeah, although maybe you are the information super predator.

You're the apex information consumer. Oh, what? Really? Huh. Nobody has ever called me the apex anything. Well, think about it. You talk to lots of scientists and you distill from all of them little bits of crucial science knowledge. Wow.

Maybe that's why I'm so full all the time. It's a lot of bananas to eat. Yeah, that or you're just consuming all those scientists' brains effectively. That makes you sound like a science zombie. I'm not sure. Now I'm a zombie too. Oh, my goodness. First I was regurgitating.

Now I'm stumbling around, half dead. Actually, that is pretty accurate these days. At this time in the morning, you do a good zombie impression. Now, you told me zombies don't always stumble. Sometimes zombies are fast moving and even articulate. Yeah, yeah. Let's get into zombies. Yeah, the new kinds of zombies are now fast and furious.

We got a lot of response from the zombie star episode. people writing in recommending zombie movies that they thought I might enjoy. Oh, good. Are you going to watch them? Do you need an honest answer to that question? Yeah, well, why not? There's too many things out there to watch. So they're on my list, but I might not make it.

I see. That's the political answer. Got it, got it. But thank you, everyone, for your suggestions. I will get to them eventually. Well, I'm curious to know what's on that list. But today, we're talking about something a little bit different than zombie stars. That's right.

We are venturing into the border between. physics and philosophy. We are not just trying to understand how the universe work. We're trying to understand what it means. Because physics is more than just a list of laws. It's an attempt to get some deep intuitive understanding into how the universe works. To reach those aha moments where you feel like, I get it. I understand something now about how the universe is doing it that I didn't understand before. Wait, wait, wait. We're going into philosophical territory here. Can we go back to the zombies? Well, we can talk about philosophical zombies, if you like.

That's one of my favorite topics. Or the philosophy of zombies. Like, is a zombie still a person or not? No, that's philosophy by zombies. You know, they have whole journals that only zombies write for. Oh, no. It is kind of a half-dead discipline anyways. No, the overlap between physics and philosophy is very healthy, very vibrant, really fascinating.

And for me, one of the motivating aspects of physics. one reason we do physics is to help answer questions which in the end are philosophical what does it mean to be alive why are we here what should we do with our lives how do we make sense of this cosmos those aren't science questions but the answers to science questions can help us understand how to tackle those other more difficult philosophical questions yeah because i guess it is a pretty incredible universe and even though we may one day understand how it all works there's still sort of the questions that you can ask beyond that beyond physics right like what What does it mean or why are we here? And some of those questions are really simple sounding questions. The kind of questions you often ask me. When I start talking about something complicated and you're like, hold on, back up, what are we even talking about? Can you give me a definition of space or mass? What are these things we're talking about?

Do we really understand them? Yeah, because I guess, you know, you grow up in this universe and maybe you become a physicist or not, but you still kind of study it and you, you know, you start to take things a little bit for granted, you know, in a way. You know, we think about the fact that we walk around on this planet, but why are we stuck to this planet at all and not floating out there in space? Yeah, it's a really important exercise to take a step back and say, what is this thing we're talking about? What does it really mean? What do we know about it? What can we learn about the nature of the universe from what we know about how these physical processes happen?

Yeah, it always amazes me that there are basic concepts in physics that physicists don't really have a good definition for or a good explanation for. You know, we covered a lot of them in our book. We have no idea, a guide to the unknown universe. But it's still amazing that there are things that even we didn't cover in that book that physicists still struggled to define. You don't have to know what you're talking about to sometimes accomplish something in physics. The most famous example is quantum mechanics. Nobody really understands what it means, but we can do really complicated, really accurate

calculations and predictions using quantum mechanics, even if we don't quite grasp what exactly is going on. Yeah. And maybe out of all those basic consequences, about the universe, there are maybe non more basic than the idea of energy. That seems like a super duper basic concept in physics. It is in fact, and it's something a lot of listeners over the years have written in to ask us to talk about. So today on the podcast, we'll be tackling the question. What is energy? And where can we get some more of it? That's not coming from a coffee

or dead plants underground but it is kind of sort of an interesting question i think because it's so short right like this is one of the shortest questions we've tackled in a long time on this podcast it's just three words what is energy maybe we should add a fourth one man what is energy man what is energy anyway or maybe what it but i guess we could go deeper we go what is eventually we'll just be asking the question what maybe that's all the physics and philosophy is, which is responding to the universe and going,

what? Yeah. But then we will, you know, like a Marvel movie, we'll find another sequel. We'll go with, what?

Where? Or speechless. It's a new sequel. But it is a really simple sounding question with a lot of subtle nuances, which is why it took us a little while to figure out how to attack it. It's a short question without an easy,

simple answer. Yeah, I was thinking about this word, and it's kind of interesting because I think everyone, you know, knows the word, obviously, energy and has something, you know, some, some intuitive sense attached to it. But, you know, if you sort of think about what is it, it's kind of hard to define. Yeah, you're used to talking about it. You think about it in your life. You pay for it.

You use it. But if you sit on your couch late at night and wonder like, what is it? Seems to have so many forms. They can transform back and forth into each other. It's a vital part of the universe. It feels like it should be something fundamental. But is a physical thing? Is it just a calculation that we do, is it a philosophical question? It's a really hard thing to grapple with. Yeah. And even physicists in their textbooks have sort of a hard time pinning this down, right? I mean, there is sort of an official definition of it, right? As the capacity to do work. Yeah, there is that definition. But then you look up the official definition of work and it's energy transfer. It loops the bag on itself, like inception. Yeah, exactly. Definition, C definition.

So energy is defined in terms of work and work is defined in terms of energy. So like what is this thing we're talking about? Wow. Interesting. Yeah. Because I guess that's the only way we know how to define it, kind of, maybe. Sort of. And you have to grapple with the subtlety between physics definitions, like what we technically mean by work

and our intuitive understanding of these concepts. Because physics often repurposes a word that everybody uses in normal language to mean something very specific. and technical for physics. That's true, for example, for work. Interesting. Well, let's start to dig into this. But first, as usual, we're wondering

how many people out there had thought about this very basic question and how many people out there think they know the answer to this. So thanks very much to everybody who volunteered to answer difficult, random questions from an internet physicist. I really appreciate your work.

And if you're out there and have been listening to the podcast and want to put your voice to these questions, please don't be shy. Send me an email to questions at danielanhorpe.com. Think about it for a second. What do you think?

Energy is, or how would you explain it? Here's what people had to say. I remember learning in maybe high school physics that energy is the ability for something to do work. I think that that's probably not nuanced enough of a definition. A more nuanced way to look at it might be it's something's ability

to affect change, which doesn't necessarily have to be work in sort of like the classic physics definition. I think energy is, truly just a vibration and the energy potential is dictated by the field, the vibration or string sits with him. I've asked this question to someone who knew a lot about physics before and their answer was not useful to me. What I came away with is like energy is potential for things to happen and concentrations of that potential and it's expressed in a lot of ways. This feels like it should be one of the

those really easy questions to answer fifth graders should know this or something, but I'm having trouble explaining it. It is a force, but needed to create force? I mean, I think of going down to like the atomic level. Energy is like the movement of electrons. Intuitively, when I think of energy, I think about vibrating particles. And the faster they're vibrating, the faster, the more energy they have. But I guess at a more fundamental level, energy is about probably fields and like how much energy is in a certain field dictating what kind of particle is and what that particle is doing. I think energy is just like tiny movement of particles that gets passed along from

particle to particle. Energy is the opposite side of the coin is mass. But my guess is you're referring to the fundamental building blocks of energy. And I'm not sure what those could be. All right. Interesting answers. Pretty deep ones too. A lot of people are like, it's a vibe, man.

It's a mood. Yeah. And some people giving examples of what energy is. And some people talking about the different forms of it. They're really interesting answers here. Thanks, everyone. Yeah. And some people even sort of went with the official definition,

which is that it's related to your ability to do work or to make work or change work. But did you follow up with them then? What does work mean? No, I don't actually have live conversations with these folks. It's just via email. When I do interviews on campus, then I can ask fun follow-up questions like, does that scare you?

Are you worried about that? But here I just give them the one shot. I see, I see, I see. You try to instill fear in them. No, I try to be friendly and not instill fear in them over email in person. Yeah, absolutely. I'll put them on the spot. All right. Well, it's a tricky subject. And I think as we'll find out, it's something that has some deep mysteries about it, right? It's not an easy answer.

It's not an easy answer. All right. Well, Daniel, let's step us through. What are some of the first things that physicists think of when they think of energy? So right off the bat, we should just admit that we don't fundamentally know what energy is. Wait, what? We're done with the podcast. Boom, that's it. Nobody knows. That's it. We know some things about it. We figured some. things out and you can use those to piece together a picture of what it might be and what that means but fundamentally it remains a philosophical mystery what energy is first maybe i should put the question back on you and ask like what kind of answer do people expect like what kind of answer

would be satisfying or is the sort of nature of the question we're even asking you want to know if energy is like a thing that flows or if it's made out of little energy ons or just like a concise definition of what this thing is well i mean you sort of give it away, you kind of spoiled the answer for me here. And it makes me not want to try. I mean, if you guys don't know what it is, what would I know? But it's kind of an interesting question. I think, you know, at the base of it, I think most people think of energy as like the opposite of not moving. You know what I mean? Like, it's the opposite of standing still and not doing anything. Like if you have energy, then you're doing something. You didn't work, I guess.

Yeah. And I think that a lot of the concepts about energy start from examples. think some of the difficulty comes from the fact that you can put lots of different kinds of examples together and then wonder like what do they all have in common you know if mass is energy or this is energy then what are they all have in common and so maybe we should start with sort of like the history of the idea of the development of energy how people discover different forms of energy and then talk about the common thread between them yeah yeah sure well I was thinking kind it's kind of like maybe the opposite of the phrase nothing happens like if nothing happens ever then there's no energy. But if things happen, then there's energy. It's like maybe related to the

word happening. That's possibly true, but there are subtle wrinkles there. Like, you can have a universe with a lot of energy, but no free energy. Like the heat death of the universe, nothing can really happen. But there is a lot of energy in the universe. There's just none available to do work because there's no energy gradients. There are different kinds of energy. There are different kinds of energy. And fundamentally, the game we're playing here is that we're looking around in the universe and we're coming up with ways to do calculations and we're wondering, do those mean anything? And energy in that sense isn't like something physical. It's an observation we make about the universe.

Like I can look at a physical system, you know, the earth moving around the sun and I can do a calculation. I can say, well, I'm going to define some quantity. I call it energy. And here's how I calculated it. I take the velocity. I multiply it by the mass. I add this.

I add that. That's the something I invented. Call it energy. And most of the time, if you just invent a quantity, it's not. interesting or useful doesn't reveal anything about the universe but sometimes it does and it does especially when it seems like it might be conserved when you've constructed this quantity which seems to like not change as time goes on through the universe well that's an interesting concept to think about how they came up how humans came up with the word right like did we come out with that word for

energy before science even you know what i mean like i wonder if caveman had a phrase or a word for this idea of things happening or energy I think cavemen had teenagers and teenagers didn't get out of the cave very early in the morning. And people wondered if they needed more energy. I'm sure that, you know, the intuitive concept of feeling like you have energy or you're tired, that's an age-old idea for sure. So we probably had a word for it. And then people started to use it in physics.

Yeah. And scientifically, one of the first concepts that was developed was kinetic energy. So you've got to go back to people like Leibniz, who was Newton's contemporary and, you know, also developed. Calculus. And like Newton, he also did a bit of physics, right? And so Leibniz noticed that things moved, that there's motion. And he came up with this quantity, mass times velocity, times velocity again. So mv squared. And he said, this thing seems to be conserved. He called this thing vis vis, like a living force. And so he essentially stumbled across the definition of kinetic energy and said, hey, here's a quantity, which is interesting because it seems to be conserved. It seems like as time

passes and you recalculate this quantity, it doesn't change. Right, but I guess maybe a question is, how did he notice that it was conserved? Like, why did he pick mv squared as the quantity that was concerned? Was there something specific he was studying? He didn't know why. He was just sort of like playing around, you know, sort of like a discovery in mathematics. But what do you mean? It playing around with what?

You know, at that time, people didn't understand motion. Newton hadn't developed his laws yet. So people were just like multiplying random stuff together and seeing what it could do. You know, there's not that many ways to combine basic quantities, mass, and velocity in these things. And so it's not that hard to study them. You know, across the English channel, Newton was studying momentum, mass times velocity. So Leibniz has just multiplied it by velocity one more time. I'm sure he studied other quantities like mass squared times velocity.

You found that didn't have any interesting properties. You make it sound like a bunch of monkeys in an infinite room piping under a typewriter. It's a bunch of grad students in an infinite room and they all come with one quantity. And they're like, oh, this one's not interesting. Oh, look at this one. This one seems to be conserved. I wonder what that means. But I guess I mean, like, what did he see it conserved in?

Do you know what I mean? Like he calculated in for one thing and then for another and then he saw that it was the same, I guess. But what was that thing? Yeah, so for example, physicists of this age like to do calculations about billiard balls, right? No, billiards is a very, very old game. So you can take the kinetic energy of the first ball and then it hits another one. Maybe it has a different mass, but you notice that the kinetic energy is conserved. And so you can do simple calculations there

and see that kinetic energy is conserved in these systems. So like after a collision, then they notice that this quantity seems to stay the same. Like you added up at the beginning for the two balls and then you add it up at the end for the two balls and it seemed to be the same. Is that what happened? Because if you look at the velocities,

the velocities don't stay the same. That's right. The velocities do not stay the same unless the two masses are the same. But like a really slow moving massive ball bumps into a very light ball, a low mass ball. that low mass ball will fly off at higher speeds. And so you're right, velocity isn't conserved, but this weird combination of mass and velocity squared

did seem to be conserved. So that was sort of like an experimental discovery that Leibniz made. And you know, this idea of conservation means it might be something important. It might be something like fundamental to the universe. It's like there's the philosophy aspect to it, right? Just because something is conserved, why do we care?

Because it reveals something about the inner workings of the universe. I think about this sometimes an analogy to other systems, like economics or like the water system. You know, like water goes through lots of different forms. It rains into the ocean and evaporates back up in the clouds. It flows down rivers. But in the end, the water is the water. It's changing.

It's transforming. But it's flowing through the system. The amount of water isn't changing. So that tells you that like water is deeply important to this whole cycle, right? If you identify a quantity which is conserved in physical processes, you get the sense that maybe it's important. Right. I think what you're saying is that sometimes we notice that there are things that sort of don't disappear. Like you're saying water in the water cycle, water, it changes shape and it changes forms

and it changes states, but it's still sort of like, you know, the water, the molecules don't disappear. And maybe in the case of the billiard balls, you notice that this quantity, like if you compute it, it's there in the beginning and it's there at the end and somehow it got like transformed. So maybe it's like a thing itself. Yeah, because it's easy to think of counter examples, like the number of bananas, right? The number of bananas is not constant in the universe. You can make more bananas. You can eat bananas, right? They can disappear. They can be destroyed. They can be created, right? The number of bananas is not fundamentally interesting to the universe, even if it might be personally interesting to various people. Well, that you know it.

Right, Daniel? Like, maybe they're, I mean, you haven't surveyed the whole universe. Maybe every time someone eats a banana here, a banana is born in another planet somewhere in the universe, right? You don't know. Exactly. And if you discover that to be true, that would mean something deep about bananas and the relationship to the universe. That would be a huge discovery. That would be crazy, wouldn't it? Like somehow the universe likes to keep the same number of bananas all the time. That would be weird, right? And if you eat a banana here or destroy it or make a banana smoothie, another banana's born somewhere. That would be really strange. That would be very strange. And it would be a big clue. It would say the universe is kind

of banana-e or bananas are fundamental to the universe. So when you discover a conservative quantity, something the universe maintains, then you're seeing something about the inner workings of the universe. It's revealing to you what's important. Just like how water is important in the water cycle, whereas clouds are not. So if kinetic energy is conserved, Leibniz thought, well, this must be an important thing. You know, I think if you tell anyone these days like, hey, energy is conserved or water can serve, nobody would blink an eye. But if you tell them, like, hey, did you know the universe conserves bananas?

That would be sort of a big revelation about the universe. Just like how we should look at energy and water as being kind of a big deal, right? Yeah. And just in case anybody's being misled, as far as we know, the universe does not conserve bananas. As far as we know, yes. As far as we know. For example, I'm pretty sure there were billions of years in which they were exactly zero bananas in the universe. That you know of.

That I know of, yes. But maybe all the bananas that are appearing on Earth mean that they're anti-bananas being created on alien worlds somewhere else to balance. Or I think you're saying what happened before the Earth was for. Maybe there were other planets with bananas. I'm just saying keep an open mind. You're saying bananas could predate the Earth. Yeah. That's my theory of bananas.

Well, I think your philosophy is bananas, yeah. But anyways, I think obviously trying to make the point that, you know, we should be sort of amazed and awe at the fact that energy seems to be conserved and that water, and for example, the water cycle is concerned because it doesn't have to, right? I think that's what you're saying too. Yeah, you can come up with all sorts of quantities. You can define them and most of them are not conserved. So when you find one that is, that tells you you're on to something.

It's a really interesting clue. All right. So then I guess that Leibniz called this energy? Did he coined the phrase? Or was he the first one to use it on NVSquare? Did he call it kinetic energy also? No, he called it Vs Visa, which is I think Latin for like a living force. And you know, now we know the kinetic energy on its own isn't actually conserved. I mean, under certain assumptions it is in elastic collisions where you don't break things up, kinetic energy is conserved. But on its own, kinetic energy more generally isn't conserved, of course. And I think Newton was mostly looking at momentum, right? Because that one is conserved in most collisions. Yeah, momentum is actually conserved. So Newton's combination of kinematic variables, mass times velocity, momentum, this thing actually is concerned.

But again, at the time, nobody knew why. It wasn't until we had a great mathematical genius a couple hundred years later who told us about the connections between conservation laws and symmetries, how these conservation laws reveal deep symmetries of the universe. Well, I mean, that's what they thought was the deep fundamental law of the universe, right that momentum is conserved yeah momentum conservation was discovered before we understood what it meant and why we have it what symmetry of the universe creates it we just did a whole podcast episode about why momentum is conserved it's a really fun and deep topic okay so that's one kind of energy

what were some of the other kinds of energy we've discovered so there's a second kind of energy potential energy which is a different kind of energy from kinetic energy and something i've never really been comfortable with wait what potential energy makes you uncomfortable You don't like the idea of potential. You're like, I don't want any surprises. Just give me straight up energy. Yeah, potential energy is weird and confusing. It's definitely a different kind of energy than kinetic energy,

but it's also closely related to kinetic energy. Because while kinetic energy by itself isn't conserved, the sum, kinetic plus potential that is conserved in the universe. Interesting. Well, okay, let's get into the details of that, and I want to know why it makes you uncomfortable. But first, let's take a quick break. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast.

Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills, and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like you're not going to choose an adapted strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it if it's going to be beneficial to you because it's easy to say like go you go blank yourself right it's easy it's easy to just drink the extra beer it's easy to ignore to suppress seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just like walk the other way avoidance is easier ignoring is easier

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Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. I don't write songs. God write songs. I take dictation. I didn't even know you've been a pastor for over 10 years. I think culture is any space that you live in that develops you. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us podcast, I sat down with Warren Campbell, Grammy winning producer, pastor, and music executive. to talk about the beats, the business, and the legacy behind some of the biggest names in gospel, R&B, and hip-hop.

This is like watching Michael Jackson talk about thoroughly before it happened. Was there a particular moment where you realize just how instrumental music culture was to shaping all of our global ecosystem? I was eight years old, and the Motown 25 special came on, and all the great Motown artists, Marvin, Stevie Wonder, Temptations, Diana Raw. From Mary Mary to Jennifer Hudson, we get into... to the soul of the music and the purpose that drives it. Listen to Culture raises us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're talking about energy, and it's been a very energetic discussion here, Daniel. We talked about how, you know, humans, when we start to try to understand the world,

we came up with this idea of energy because it seems to be conserved in some circumstances. and that was kinetic energy, but there's also potential energy, which is kind of a weird concept in physics, right? It makes you uncomfortable. Yeah, it is a weird concept in physics, but it's also something sort of intuitive. Like, let's say you have a banana on the top of a bookshelf, and it's just sitting there, right?

Not doing anything. And you bump it and it falls off. Before it hits the ground, it's going pretty fast. So it has kinetic energy. Where did that kinetic energy come from? Right? It came from its height. It came from the fact that it was sitting high up above the ground,

And it turned that height in the gravitational field into energy. So that's the potential energy of the banana getting turned into kinetic energy of the banana. So it's definitely energy because you can transform it into kinetic energy, into motion. But it's sort of weird because it's energy of its location, it's energy of its configuration. Right, right. I think that's where the name Potential comes from. Like it doesn't really have energy right now. It's just sitting on the table.

It doesn't really, it's not really moving, but it has a potential to move a lot. Yeah, I think that's tempting to describe it that way, but it really is energy. Potential energy is not just like the potential to have energy. It comes from energy of a potential. A potential is the way we describe how a field impacts a force on an object, like an electron moving through a potential, you know, feels of force. Right. But I think you're getting mixed up, you know, kind of tripped up here because you're saying

it's in a potential because it has the potential to move, to cause it to move. You know what I mean? It's like a circular definition. Yeah, it has the potential to move, exactly. So we don't really know what this stuff is, potential energy. I always found it really strange. Mostly it makes me uncomfortable because it doesn't really have a value in itself. It's relational.

Like the banana, how much potential energy does it have at the top of the bookshelf? We don't know. There's no number, but it has more potential energy than at the bottom of the bookshelf. Potential energy is only important in differences. You can add an arbitrary number to the potential energy of the banana at the bookshelf. it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is how much more potential energy it has at the top and the bottom. Right.

Like it's a relative quantity kind of like. It depends on where you measure it. If you measure it from the floor, it's one thing. If you measure it from the table, it's zero. Yeah. It's sort of like velocity in that sense. It's no meaning to say you're moving at a certain speed. You're only moving at a certain speed relative to something else.

The banana has potential energy relative to the floor. And something that's fascinating is that it's very easy to see kinetic energy and potential energy sloshing back and forth into each. each other. If you have, for example, a ball and you drop it, then its potential energy is going to turn into kinetic energy. And then it gets turned around when it hits the floor and its kinetic energy then gets turned back into potential energy as it climbs back up to your hand. And if there wasn't friction or air resistance, then it would just go on forever, smoothly sliding back between the two different forms of energy. Right. Like if it was jumping on an

infinite trampoline kind of, or like a perfect trampoline, this energy would, like the kinetic energy would appear and disappear, appear and disappear and the potential energy would also appear and disappear, but it would always add up to the same thing. It would always add up to the same thing. And a trampoline is a great example because it's basically like a spring. Springs have potential energy in them also, right? You squeeze a spring that takes energy. And now the energy you put into squeezing it is somehow stored in the spring, in the arrangement of the spring, the compactification of those bonds that would prefer to be relaxed. And so that's the same kind of energy. You can put it into a gravitational field, you can put it into a spring, you can put it into a squeezing of a ball,

which is basically another spring. And so all these things are potential energy. Right. And in that sense, you can sort of think of it as a thing, right? It's just a thing that changes from being kinetic to being potential. Like it's somehow there and it's always conserved. But is it a thing? When you say thing, I think something physical, you know, like water is flowing. And for a long time, people were wondering, like is energy a thing to like flow from one thing to another is it made of little energy particles but here because potential energy is a kind of energy and it's just an arrangement of other things then is it itself a thing or is it just the arrangement of other things it's complicated you mean like does it have a physical embodiment or is it just i don't know like a label

we put on on other things yeah that's a deep question i'm not sure the answer to the same question can be asked like you know what makes you you were made of the same part of the same part particles as I am, you just arranged a different way. So the U-NIS is in the arrangement of the particles. In the same way, potential energy comes from configuration of particles together. Not the particles themselves. The potential energy isn't stored in the particle. It's in the relationship between the particles.

Right, right. Unless you're a zombie, in which case your body is arrangement is decay. Well, I guess what about mass? You know, like we know that mass is the same as energy kind of in a way, right? to e equals mc squared is mass energy then i'm going to take probably surprising and weird philosophical position here which is that mass is not its own kind of energy mass is just a representation of how much energy is stored inside something how much kinetic and potential energy is in something what do you mean like things don't have inherent mass like the fundamental particles don't they have you know

mass like the electron has mass right yeah so let's break it down like the electron fundamentally doesn't have mass on its own. Its mass comes from its interactions with the Higgs field. So that's the kinetic and potential energy of the Higgs field, which changes how the electron moves through the universe as if it did have mass. But if you listen to our episode on like, what is renormalization? What is the electron's true mass in charge? You discover that fundamentally, truly the electron and the other particles have no mass on their own. It's all in their energy. Right, because I guess even the electron, it's not like it has a little bit of stuff in the middle. It just has a has the potential to interact with the Higgs field.

And that's what we call its mass. That's what we call its mass. I act a chart because we're doing this podcast, but really, I do it because we wrote a chapter on it for our second book, frequently asked questions about the universe. Yeah. And if you think about composite particles like a proton, a proton is made out of quarks, those corks have almost no mass, but the proton has a good bit of mass.

Where does that come from? It comes from the energy that binds those corks together. So the proton's mass isn't some other weird kind of mass. in the universe not like you're converting kinetic energy into some sort of substance it just comes from its internal stored energy so the way i think about mass is sort of like an indicator tells you how much energy is internally stored inside this thing in the end it's all just energy mass isn't its own form of energy it just reflects how much energy is inside something you're basically saying all mass is just potential energy potential and kinetic energy right some of the

proton's mass comes from the kinetic energy of those gluons and quarks sloshing around. So not just potential energy, but also kinetic. All right. So I think what you're saying is that we're trying to define energy. One way to do it is to look at its different kinds. And there are really, to a physics, it's only two kinds of energy, kinetic energy and potential energy. There are no other kinds, right? Are there?

I mean, there's dark energy. Wow, way to skewer us with our own terrible names. You're totally right, but we don't know what dark energy is. One theory is that it's like the fundamental quantum potential energy of all of these fields, in which case it would be a kind of potential energy. But we really just don't know what dark energy is. It's a big mystery. All right.

So ignore the 67% of the universe that is dark energy for this discussion. And let's just focus on the small bit of it that we like to talk about. No, it's a great point. But when we do figure out what dark energy is, Either it'll be kinetic energy or it'll be potential energy or it'll be some new kind of bonkers energy and I'll be wrong, in which case I'll be the first to celebrate. Yeah, basically, like I said, let's just ignore the 67% of the universe

that is dark energy. And, you know, for what impacts is, there's really only two kinds of energy you're saying, kinetic energy and potential energy. And that's it, right? And that's kind of what goes into your basic equations of the universe, right? Like, that's basically the definition of the equations of the universe. That's right.

The Schrodinger equation has kinetic energy plus potential energy in it. Hamiltonian mechanics is built on that principle. You know, classical mechanics is based on the principle of least action. And action in the end is defined in terms of these two quantities, kinetic and potential energy. And the deep mystery really is, if these two things independently are not conserved, potential and kinetic energy, but together they are, what does that mean about what they have in common? and what is that commonality? I think that in the end is the question, what is energies? What do these two things together?

What larger picture do they make up? Right, because I think maybe that's something that maybe a lot of people don't know is that when, you know, when physicists say, oh, the laws of the universe or the equations that define the universe, really what you're talking about is basically the idea that kinetic energy

and potential energy is conserved because that's what you assume when you formulate the loss of physics, right? You start with, hey, let's say, assume that kinetic and potential energy is conserved, you know, and then let's see what kind of rules that gives us. I think it actually goes the opposite direction. You can make up laws to a universe that don't have conservation of energy. If those laws, for example, are changing in time, then they don't conserve energy. And one of the greatest insights into this relationship

between conservation laws and symmetries came when people were asking about general relativity. They were like, hold on a second. Does general relativity conserve energy? That seems like it should be important. So we actually derive the laws from other places and then ask, like, hold on a second, is energy conserved? What does that mean about these things? I guess I mean like, you know, like the Hamiltonian, that's basically you're saying, hey, the sum of kinetic and potential energy should always stay the same. And then from that, you derive some of these other equations, right? Well, there's very non-satisfactory physics definition the answer to that, which is that once you define the Hamiltonian, then energy is defined to be the thing that's conserved if these rules don't change in

time. So you sort of start from the Hamiltonian and then you figure out what is the energy of the system from that. I guess what I'm saying is that it's a very fundamental concept in how theoretical physics works, right? It's not like you assume like, hey, let's assume it's changing. What does that give us? It's like you assume that it's not changing, kind of. I think there are different ways to formulate the theories of the universe and you can either start from the assumption that energy is conserved, figure out what rules are allowed, or you can just start building laws and figuring out what the consequences are and which ones actually describe our universe and then noticing that in the ones that describe our universe, this quantity we call energy seems to be conserved. There's some

different order you could use there. All right. Well, I guess for our discussion, the basic idea is that, you know, physicists sort of describe or define energy as the sum of kinetic energy plus potential energy. But what you're saying is that that's kind of a weird thing to do. Because like, how do you know kinetic energy and potential energy have to be related to each other? Exactly. They seem like very different things, right? What does it mean that these two very different things are closely related? Like if you discovered, well, the number of bananas in the universe isn't conserved, but bananas plus apples, that's conserved. That would be really interesting connection between bananas and apples. You're like, hmm, it turns out they have more in common than I thought. Right. Then they have a kid song together. Apples and bananas.

I think we need to hear a snippet of it. Go ahead. All right. Can you play it for us? I don't have my kazoo here. Otherwise, I would. Well, I think what you're saying is that it's kind of weird to put them together. But if you put it, them together, then it seems to be constant in the universe. And it seems to give us these equations that seem to work and seem to like predict where particles are going to go and what's going to happen to them and what kinds there are even. Exactly. And what that means is that they really do have something in common. They're part of the same thing. They're not the same thing. They're like

two halves of a puzzle that click together perfectly to make something new. And then we have to ask the question, what does that mean? What do they have in common? What is this larger thing that they're a part of. All right. So then are they conserved? Because I know sometimes they're not conserved. So they are conserved in the case where the laws of physics do not change. So if the laws of physics you're using are the same now and the same in 10 minutes and the same in a thousand years, then kinetic energy plus potential energy is conserved. That's absolutely true. Now in our universe, the laws of physics are almost the same from moment to moment. They're usually the same. You can do the experiment at Large Hadron Collider today and tomorrow and next year and get the same measurements.

But there is one way in which those laws are changing, which is that space itself is expanding. As you mentioned, dark energy is accelerating the expansion of the universe, making it bigger and bigger and changing the distances between things. And that technically is a change in the laws of physics as a function of time, meaning that energy is not technically conserved. That's not really relevant for balls rolling down planes or bananas falling off of bookshelves or any experiment we are going to do. But if we want a deepest understanding of energy,

then it turns out in our universe, it's not technically conserved, but almost. Right, right. Well, I feel like you're maybe cheating a little bit here. I feel like you're saying that we have these laws that we think describe the universe, and in them, energy is conserved, unless our laws are wrong,

in which case it doesn't. Does that make sense? I feel like maybe what's really happening is that we don't have to write laws of the universe. Like we only have laws that seem to work for, you know, moment to moment or that doesn't take into account the 67% of the universe that's making it expand. Really, we just kind of may don't have the right laws. It might also be that the laws really are a function of time, right? That the way things work changes as the universe goes on.

That's just the way the universe is. Wait, what? You mean, like, it's a function of something, but it's not a function of anything? It could be a function of time, right? But based on what law? The laws themselves could just be a function of time. You know, why, for example, are constants constant? If the gravitational constant changed as a function of time, then you could get free energy.

If gravity disappeared every Tuesday morning for an hour, then I could, with no energy, take a big box of bananas and put it on a bookshelf. And then when gravity came back, I could knock it off and extract the energy from it. So I'd have an infinite energy machine if the gravitational constant wasn't constant. So if these constants are changing, then energy is not concerned. Right, right. But isn't that, I mean, that idea you're saying like, hey, let's just give up and stop asking questions, isn't that sort of a lot of what you talk against about, right? Like, you know, if you discovered that the laws of the universe are changing for some unknown reason, wouldn't you want to know what that reason was?

Oh, absolutely, yes. And it doesn't mean you can't find an explanation, right? The laws can be changing and those laws can be changing for a good reason. It could be like only one consistent way for the universe to be and it requires these constants to change. It's still following some system, which is governing how those constants change, but the constants themselves, the ones that describe the motion of things and how you get equations of motion, if those are changing, then this quantity we call energy is not concerned. Right, right.

But I guess I'm saying if there's a system that is determining how the loss of the universe are changing, then maybe that system is the real true set of equations that govern the universe. Sure, absolutely. And there could be like the true system that governs these laws. laws, but the ones that determine how things move, right, that determine motion of things through the universe, if those laws are a function of time, because they're controlled by some super deep meta laws, right? If those laws that determine how things move through the universe, if those are changing,

then energy is not conserved. Well, I think we're getting a little bit lost because we're talking about energy. I think what you're saying is that energy is conserved if you look at it locally, like our little, you know, what we've seen of the universe and what laws we've coupled together. But if you look at the big, big picture, energy is not conserved, which kind of makes you wonder like what it is, right? Exactly. Or throws into question even more our ideas of it and points to the fact that we don't really know what it is because it's not even conserved like we thought it was.

Exactly. And it also questions like how important is it? One of the reasons we thought it was important is because we thought it was conserved. We thought it was a deep truth in the universe. It revealed something fundamental. If it's not actually conserved, it means it's maybe not as important as. as we thought. Right, right.

It points, like, maybe it's just the pawn in the, you know, meta law of the universe that we have no idea about so far. Exactly. It's just like a lowly fruit, like a cherry, instead of the regal banana. Instead of the regal banana. Exactly. The all-important banana.

Yes. All right, well, let's get into a little bit more about what we don't know about the definition of energy and what it could all mean, man. But first, let's take another quick break. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills, and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face.

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I take dictation. I didn't even know you've been a pastor for over 10 years. I think culture is any space that you live in that develops you. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us podcast, I sat down with Warren Campbell, Grammy-winning producer, pastor, and music executive to talk about the beats, the business, and the legacy behind some of the biggest names in gospel, R&B, and hip-hop. This is like watching Michael Jackson talk about thoroughly before it happened.

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and the other one is not, clearly. But I guess I'm getting the picture that, you know, we kind of thought we knew what energy was. We thought it was this fundamental thing that always seems to be conserved. But it turns out that it's not always conserved. So now maybe it's not only, do we not know what it is, but maybe it's not even fundamental. Yeah, that's right. And it's sort of disappointing because even a small amount of non-conservation means it's just not conserved. You know, there's like two things. Things are conserved and things that are not. There's a whole bunch of categories of things that are not conserved. And being almost conserved means I guess you're important, but not really truly

fundamental. All right. Well, then what would you say energy is then? I would say I wish I knew. And it's something definitely deep and interesting in the universe, right? It's something that is almost conserved and it can slosh back and forth between these two different kind of things that feel very, very different. What is energy? The philosophical question really is, what do kinetic and potential energy have in common? What are they part of when you put them together? In the same way that like you can put electricity and magnetism together into a holistic thing and get an understanding of electromagnetism. You're like, oh, that explains this and that and brings all these ideas together. You have a feeling of having an answer. If we understood how kinetic energy and potential energy

fit together into one holistic thing, we'd be able to grapple better with this question. I feel like you're saying like maybe even the word energy is a little distracting from the real question, which is like, why is there a relationship between, you know, motion and potential? in a way? Or even like, why does potential exist at all? Exactly. And you can try to tease it apart by looking at the equations of motion and saying like, what is it that defines how things move and why can this weird quantity slosh back and forth? And one way to get a little bit of insight into it is to understand that potential really is also about motion. Like potential energy is what causes forces, right? The reason that the

banana falls off the bookshelf and accelerates towards the floor is because there's a gravitational force there is a force there because there's a difference in the potential so you can think about in terms of kinetic energy and potential energy you can also think about it in terms of like motion and forces like a particle just flying through the universe it just has kinetic energy now add other particles interacting with it putting forces on it those are creating potential energy for that particle in some sense it's not kinetic energy and potential energy it's kinetic energy and other forces is changing its kinetic energy. I think what you're saying is that maybe there's really only motion and potential motion.

It's like there's only motion in the universe, and then there's what happens when two things that have motion kind of bump into each other. Somehow, for some reason, they interact in a way that creates potential. But really, you're just talking about motion and what happens in that interaction. Exactly. And this is the philosophical process of sort of stumbling towards a deeper concept. of trying to understand what these things have in common and generalize it into an idea that really fits together that can hold as a bucket all these different concepts that we consider energy in its properties. And it's connected to this other question we talked about like

are fields real? Well, it sort of sounds like you're saying that maybe there's only really kinetic energy, right? Like there's only kinetic energy and there's also what happens when two things that have kinetic energy interact with each other, right? Like it sounds like maybe potential energy is really just about motion and interactions. And so you can, got to ask like why does the universe have motion and why does it have interactions like right right if it didn't have interactions everyone would just fly around by themselves there would just be kinetic energy and that would never change but it changes because we have these interactions in the universe and that goes to like an even more abstract question which is like why do you consider things

is interacting that assumes that there's different things that you can say like there's this one thing and that other thing well how do you draw the line between them right it's like one half of the earth interacting with the other half of the earth, how do you slice that? Why do you call the earth one thing and not two things? And anytime your ideas are based on totally arbitrary designations like that, like this is a thing, but that's not a thing or this is two things, then you know that you're looking at it the wrong way. I think the work that's left to be done is to understand this as one holistic thing. You know, what is it really that's flowing between two objects where one is in motion and then another one is in motion? How is that flowing? Is it really changing to a different

kind of energy or is there one holistic super kind of idea there that you can understand connects these two things right right like maybe there aren't humans and zombies maybe we're all just human and zombies just have the potential to eat humans exactly maybe before you eat the banana the banana is already kind of part of you you know Jorge plus banana is already the thing even before you eat the banana I think what you're saying is that you know we talk about kinetic energy and potential energy but really maybe there's just part of this same thing like motion plus interactions right if i zoom in on a particle on like a proton i'd say oh look those quirks have kinetic energy inside of them but if i zoom out and just look at the proton i'm like

oh no the protons at rest it has no kinetic energy so how much kinetic energy there is depends on like what i'm defining to be a thing or not it seems sort of arbitrary and i think that's the biggest clue that will lead us to a deeper understanding of energy but i don't have that understanding today well let's touch a little bit into that's the scenario that you mentioned earlier in the episode which is the end of the universe and that maybe one potential end of the universe is the heat death of the universe where, you know, everything has energy but nothing can happen. Everything, you know, particles are moving like a giant gas. And so there's definitely energy there, but no potential energy. Is that what you're saying? It's a scenario where there's no potential energy left

in the universe. Yeah, there's useful energy and then there's sort of useless energy. A useful energy is energy you can use to do work to like move something up a potential for example and you know if you have energy in a battery you can take that energy and use it to power an engine and it can like push your banana up off the floor back to the top of the bookshelf that's useful energy and that only happens when you have energy localized somewhere right when you have low entropy when there's organization of stuff opposite of that is useless energy energy like heat if everything is just hot and everything is the same temperature, there's no temperature difference, there's no energy gradients. You can't use that to power an engine. Like if you have an engine and you're in a universe

where everything is smooth but hot, there's no way to take that energy, those motion of the particles and turn that into something useful. So the key idea there is entropy. Entropy, right. Yeah. There's like everything's a hot mess is what you're saying, a bland hot mess. But wouldn't I guess even in that scenario, wouldn't gravity eventually kind of bring stuff together creating potential energy? Or like, how does gravity disappear in this scenario? Gravity doesn't disappear, but it can't do anything in that scenario because everything is smooth and homogeneous. Gravity requires some clump to get things started. Like in the early universe, we didn't have a smooth and homogenous blob of stuff in the very beginning. We had little

quantum fluctuations, little bits of over density and under density that gravity grabbed onto and exaggerated. But if you have the true heat death of the universe where everything is spread out equally, then every particle feels the same gravitational pull in every direction. So it basically cancels out. What is this idea of entropy? How does that impact our definition of energy? Like maybe it's not real or something? Well, folks who love and understand thermodynamics have different definitions of energy.

There's energy in general. And then there's free energy, which is sort of like energy available to do useful work. And then there's also discounted energy and energy on sale. And then there's free lunch, which apparently doesn't even exist. that we know of, but as you said, the universe is changing, Daniel. Maybe there will be free lunch in the future for everyone. That's right. And these topics always make me uncomfortable.

Thermodynamics is the topping in physics that I avoided as much as possible when I was taking classes. Right. That and zombie movies. Or maybe they're both the same thing, right? Zombies are about decay and things breaking down. Maybe this all turned out to be a deep psychological journey into Daniel's psyche. That's right. we're understanding the conservation of Daniel's decisions.

Zombies and entropy make you uncomfortable. Maybe we should dig deeper into that, Daniel. Did something happen in your childhood? Yes, a zombie came and entropyed my bedroom when I was a kid and I'm scared now. No, thermodynamics to me is complicated because you're just so many particles. It's all about statistical statements of large systems of particles. For me, it's easier to grapple with one particle bouncing off another particle because I would like to get down to the microscopic picture of what's really happening.

And thermodynamics is about, like, zooming out and trying to make, like, broad statements about systems. It's not the same as philosophy, though. Yeah, but philosophy, nobody has any wrong answers. That's right. It's not verifiable. How convenient. Well, I think the overall picture I'm getting is that to answer the question, what is energy, it's tough, you know. We have different labels for it. There's kinetic energy. There's potential energy. That seems to be all about there is to it. But that's not the full picture. It seems to be concerned, but it's not really conserved in the universe.

And so maybe it's not even an important thing or maybe it's not even a thing. Like maybe in the future, aliens will be like, why do you guys are thinking about energy? That's like thinking about the ether or thinking about, you know, the soul or something. Like that's a thing that doesn't make sense. Yeah, it definitely is driven from an intuitive experience with the world and then try to extrapolate that to physics and understand if it makes sense. And it sort of kind of seems like it does, but maybe it doesn't quite. we definitely still have work to do. And, you know, if you look into a physics book or Google this question, you might find

some confusing answers. Some of them are things like energy is the quantity that's conserved if the laws of physics don't change. So they're like defining it to be the conserved thing, which doesn't really tell you like what it is. It just tells you how Nuther's theorem impacts these laws of physics doesn't really tell you like what it is. I think we're still struggling to figure out exactly what energy is.

Right. It might need to be redefined now that we sort of know. And this is only reason that we know that the universe is changing and the laws of physics are not constant. Yeah. So the history of this scene over a few hundred years is like discovery of kinetic energy. That seems to be conserved. Oops. No, it's not.

Only kinetic energy plus potential energy is conserved. And then Einstein's general relativity is a whole new system for the universe. And Nother says, hold on a second. That doesn't guarantee conservation of energy. So we're like, oops, better patch that up, make sure it conserves energy. And then we discover actually it doesn't conserve energy. the universe disagrees with that whole idea. So it's been a lot of back and forth.

Yeah, I'm amazed you guys still have the energy to keep at it. Well, somebody keeps eating bananas, and so we keep asking questions. Right, maybe bananas are concerned. Well, it seems like maybe we won't define it anytime soon, but I think it sort of points to the idea that there are these deep relationships in the universe between motion and potential and fields, and we're still trying to, trying to figure out what those relationships are because that kind of tells, that's what's going to tell us what the true nature of the universe is. Yeah. And one of the deepest goals in physics is to come up with a concise mathematical story about how the universe works in a way that makes sense to us.

And that's what we're struggling with here is connecting these mathematical concepts with intuitive ideas that gel with us, that tell us something about the nature of the universe, more than just looking at the black and white equations on a page. Yeah, and that's what it's all about, gelling with the universe and eat a banana and gel and chill out. Exactly, but don't eat the last banana because this is a fixed number of them in the universe, and if you eat the last one, Jorge can't, and then we won't have any more pocket. No, no, it's an evergreen quantity, right? I thought that we concluded, no? Oh, I see. Eat all the bananas you want, right?

Because somewhere, some unknown process is recreating them. That's a nice universe to live in. Yeah, yeah, pretty bananas. All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that discussion. And thanks for joining us. See you next time. Thanks for listening. And remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe

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