Potential.
IANAPhysicist
An interesting thing to do is to consider entropy. Imagine you have a giant box that is divided into two sections internaly. One of the two sections is a vacuum, and the other is highly compressed with air. Now imagine that you place a pinwheel on the dividing wall on the side of the vacuum and then prick a hole just behind it. The pressure difference will cause the compressed air to move through the hole, turning our pinwheel, until the two chambers have equalised, at which point the pinwheel will no longer be able to turn.
Due to the state of equilibrium, it’s no longer possible to create the driving energy to turn our pinwheel, even though all of the air, the dividing wall, the pinwheel are all still there.
For every moment that the pressure in the two chambers is becoming closer to each other, entropy is being introduced–that is to say, the amount of potential in the system is being reduced. And energy is simply the opposite of entropy.
One could say that the big bang was a hole opening in a chamber wall and the universe and everything in it is nothing more than the time we have until the pressure equalises. We’re just an odd beast that happens to have senses that we call touch, smell, taste, etc. that detect the difference potential that is the universe in ways that are interesting and diverse to us as it is beneficial to us to be able to do so.
Just some thoughts on the matter (I mean energy). I certainly stand to be corrected.
First off , energy is defined as the capacity to do work. We can only observe it when it operates kinetically on a medium. It is not composed of matter. For example an ocean wave.
If we get right down to the atomic level, there are strong opposing forces on subatomic particles keeping particles confined. Take away one force and the confined particles will go into motion. Much like taking away a reactive force on an elevated object with potential energy to release kinetic energy (high school physics)
Energy’s easy. The stuff that dreams are made of - that’s hard.
Not necessarily. In that analogy, when the Big Bang occured, the “other room” had twice as much energy to release, and released it, our universe isn’t the “pinwheel”, its the other room. we’d be the pinwheel, in that case, but the energy doesn’t appear to be going anywhere, so I’d say we’d be closer to the other room, so we don’t have to worry about pressure equalization.
We’re not the the pinwheel, nor either room, nor the air. The universe is the energy potential–“the lack of equilibrium”–being perceived as something tangible by us.
Not to say that I’m correct, just so goes my understanding.
>Energy and mass and information are all made of the same stuff. I think a kilogram contains about 10^65 bits.
>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…
>This is fascinating to me. Any web sources to check out? I’d like to investigate further
The paper is “Information in the Holographic Universe” by Jacob D. Bekenstein. I got a reprint of this as a .pdf file from Scientific American’s web site at sciam.com. Their copyright date on that doc is 2003.
>And why wouldn’t it be cubic Planck lengths, what with there being three spatial dimensions?
Very observant of you. The information you can pack into a sphere is proportional to the square of its diameter, rather than the cube, for Einsteinian general relativistic reasons relating to the warping of the space. In the limit, it is the mass of all that information that warps space inside the sphere.
I basically agree. As far as I know, “energy” is a concept that is used to explain observed phenomena and not a physical entity. My physics teacher referred to it as a “bookkeeping device.”
Turning to the other half of the OP’s question:
It sounds like you probably want to start at Quantum mechanics - Wikipedia and read that article and several of the atricles it links to, and several of the articles they link to. Once you’re good and confused, but have some of the vacabulary, come back with more focussed questions & we’ll try again.
When discussing “observation”, it’s important to understand that most experts wish a different name had been given to the idea; “observation” carries a lot of metaphysical & philosophical connotations that just aren’t right.
The idea is simply that when a particle interacts with another, consequences result. Well Duh.
When two billiard balls collide, they change course & speed. When two subatomic particles interact, they change course & speed (among other things). There is nothing weird or magical about that. It doesn’t require a living, breathing, intelligent observer to make that happen, despite some of the overwrought philosophizing of the popular science press & the religious nutcases.
We all recognize that prior to the collision the two billiard balls had knowable, measurable, observeable courses & speeds. Nobody/nothing had to observe, but the quantities existed with discrete values nonetheless.
At QM scales with subatomic particles, the weirdness is that in a very real sense the various quantities (speed, spin, direction, location, etc.) did not exist. Not that we don’t know what their values are, but that the values are inherently unknowable because they are as-yet undetermined. The particle isn’t doing any particular thing at all, or in an alternative interpratation, it is doing every possible thing at once.
In the course of an interaction with something else, say another particle, some of those values become determined & can then be measured / recorded / “observed” in the traditional human-centric sense.
But only some values, not all, are determined by an interaction. This was Heisenberg’s big idea. If an interaction makes velocity highly determined, some other quantity (perhaps position) must be very weakly determined, or in fact still indeterminate.
And finally, since the only way we macro-scale critters can measure a particle is to cause it to interact with other particles, then we perforce alter the values under measurement. To make the experiment is to disturb the action you’re trying to study.
At the layman level, there’s not much practical difference between “something happened but I didn’t notice what it was” versus “something happened but I couldn’t possibly have noticed what it was”.
So for laymen there’s not much Philosophy attached to the weird reality of QM. But if you’re a physicist, the difference puts some limitations on what you can know & hence on what you can do.
For the sake of balance, we religious nutcases have not cornered the market on overwrought philosophizing.:
- The god-concept designates an omniscient and omnipresent – all-observing – being (i.e. its knowledge effectively observes all phenomena).
- Observation collapses quantum superpositions.
- An all-observing being would automatically collapse all quantum superpositions. (from 2)
- We observe that not all quantum superpositions are collapsed.
- Therefore, gods cannot exist. (from 1, 3 and 4)
If string theory is correct ,the ultimate construction is an energy whose differences are due to vibration frequencies. There fore at its base everything is music.
I was under the impression that the double-slit experiment (and its follow-up ‘Quantum eraser experiment’ and ITS follow-up the ‘delayed-choice quantum eraser’) demonstrated how simply observing the photons forced them to behave like matter instead of waves.