If matter is composed of huge amounts of energy, then what is the ubiquitious stuff that goes into creating energy itself? Quantum particles? Wisdom?
I have read that at quantum levels, simply observing a particle changes it. Is this true and what implications might this have? 
Turtles.
If energy was made of quantum particles, we’d have to ask what those particles are made of.
“Stuff is made of atoms. Therefore, atoms can’t be made of stuff.” — Raymond Hall of Fermilab
Sorry, but this is not complete.
It’s turtles ‘all the way down’!
I don’t know what energy is made of. :o
I believe that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that you can either know where a particle is or where it’s going, but not both.
Energy is made of math.
What a beautiful answer! 
Energy and mass and information are all made of the same stuff. I think a kilogram contains about 10^65 bits. I mean here information per se, not the material things people use to store information like transistors or abacus beads.
The amount of information you can pack into a space has a relativistic limit (because its mass warps the space) that is proportional to the area of the bounding sphere of the space. The limit is something like 2/3 Pi times the area in square Planck lengths. There was a nice article in Scientific American several years ago about this.
Energy is the way physicists keep score 
Si
Great question, terrible answers.
I suspect the concise summation is, “We don’t know.”
No, that’s the next answer - we hadn’t got that far yet.
Terrible answers, huh?
Did you read post 5?
I answered one of his points (about observing particles) and said I didn’t know what energy was made of.
Your answer is saying you ‘suspect’ that we don’t know? :smack:
Not quite. You can only determine the position and momentum of a particle to withing some error range, and the more you know about one variable, the less you know about the other. This is true of several different pairs of variables-- Energy and Time being another.
Thing is, this isn’t all that exotic. It is the nature of things that are described by a wave equation, and as soon as it was determined that, at the quantum level, you needed a wave equation to describe the physics, then some sort of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle was inevitable.
It’s a bit of a nitpick, but the question should be worded this way:
What is energy?
To ask what energy is made of constrains the paradigm to one in which things we observe at a macro level are made up of some smaller items cobbled together.
I find it easier to think of energy as a behaviour. The assorted equations from both the macro and quantum paradigms try to describe how the universe we know, and energy within it, behave. They don’t tell us what energy is.
In my simple distillation of current paradigms, we have done reasonably well describing how mass and energy behave, but we have no idea about the matrix in which they behave–the “fabric” that is space itself. Without that third component, we have no idea what mass and energy actually are.
When I was at school I asked my physics teachers the same question, ‘What is energy?’. The answer I was given was, ‘Energy is the potential to do work’. I was impressed at the time and thought it was ever such a clever answer. Now that I am a lot older and just a little bit wiser, I think it was the sort of answer that was designed to stop me asking questions and to disguise the fact that they (the teachers) didn’t have a good answer ready. Come to think of it, this applies to most of the answers I got from teachers at the time.
I’ll have a go.
As has already been pointed out, asking ‘What is energy made of?’ tends to lure us down the path of considering energy to be ‘stuff’ that is made of smaller particles of ‘smaller stuff’. This isn’t accurate or helpful, and doesn’t lead to any satisfactory answers.
Asking ‘What *is *energy?’ is a better question. Some will say that ‘It is what can be converted into matter’, an intentionally circular definition since we have known at least since the atomic age that ‘matter can be converted into energy’. Before people object that this is just a circular definition, let it be said that to some extent all definitions or sets of definitions have to embrace circularity. A dictionary can only be written in words.
If one wants to do more than just dream up circular pairs of definitions, one might say ‘Energy is the label we use to quantify and record our experience of such phenomena as heat, light, pressure and motion, and as a concept it helps us to understand how these experiences arise and can, to some extent, be controlled and manipulated’.
Well, we don’t really know what matter is, either. We can say it is made up of elementary particles, but that just begs the question-- what are the elementary particles made of? String theory offers an alternative, but what are the strings?
We define energy as the potential to do work, but we have to keep in mind that Physics is a model we impose on the physical world in order to understand it. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the world actually is that way, although we try our best to make it as close an approximation as we can.
It’s like the old question about the electron: Is it a wave or a particle? Well, sometimes it behaves like a particle and sometimes it behaves like a wave, but that doesn’t make it either or both. It’s an electron, and we use a wave equation to describe it’s behavior at the quantum level.
Energy is a property of a system that we have observed to be conserved, within that system. In Classical Physics it can take on different forms (kenetic or potential). Relativity tells us that energy can be converted into mass, and mass can be converted in energy. What that means about what either of things actually is… well, they are what we define them to be. We base those definition on observations, but in the end they’re just a model that we invented to understand the world we observe.
I disagree. Fear Itself’s answer coincides nicely with thoughts from the quantum mechanics pioneers themselves.
“The atoms or the elementary particles are not real; they form a world of potentialities and possibilities rather than one of things or facts.” Werner Heisenberg
“There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum mechanical description.” Niels Bohr
Now, *there * I agree with you. And I so happen to have another appropriate quote.
“Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.” Arthur Eddington
“Energy” is one of those physics concepts like “force” which are created merely as an interpretive convenience.
If you think about it, physics “defines” energy only in terms of what it can and can’t do, i.e. via the laws of thermodynamics. The term “energy” is introduced simply to make the laws easier to express and comprehend. In an analogous way, “Force” itself does not exist as a metaphysical entity; it is simply used as a concept so that we can express Newton’s laws more concisely.
This is fascinating to me. Any web sources to check out? I’d like to investigate further
And why wouldn’t it be cubic Planck lengths, what with there being three spatial dimensions? Also, how is time figured in since time is inseperable from space relativistically?