ΔE and you and me

01/01/2026        

Roadmap

  • Physical energy
  • Human energy - define it
  • How people can leverage it
  • Forcing it vs not forcing it
  • Enjoy it! No matter what form it takes. There is nothing bad about energy, inherently, its value is >= 0.

Ask a physicist what energy is, and they’ll have a pretty fast answer for you. Ask most ordinary people (with all due respect to physicists) what energy is, and they too, will have quick responses. For a physicist, energy is a relative state. It is the capacity to do work, or store change. It is, in a sense, the lack of entropy. Objects all have various levels of energy, and so the interesting question becomes not what level of energy an object might have (for every material under the sun operates at a different baseline), but instead how that energy flows and changes– delta E, ΔE, the change in energy.

Funnily enough, every supposition I made about how a physicist would see energy holds true for how most people see the more metaphorical version of energy we all contain (which is what I shall use energy to refer to, from this point). This other kind of energy is far less defined– but I think we can all agree that it exists, which is a good start! We’re generally aware of what we’d define as high energy situations (dances, parties, exercise) and low energy situations (sleeping, reading, relaxing).

There is an argument that energy as I have defined doesn’t empirically exist as something that can be objectively measured, but instead is just how humans interpret the circumstances around them. For the sake of having a baseline to conduct this monologue, I will bypass this question and simply assume energy is something that exists, but I recognize that this is less an established fact and more a personal belief.

A more pressing question, and one that impacts the earlier point, is how we would define ‘energy’, in the human sense. Is it something we can measure by decibel sound per square meter of space? Or rather, is it intrinsic to humans, in the sense that energy can be measured by the average number of kilocalories being burned per second?