Talk:Energy/Energy (template)

A sunflower reacts to the energy of photons; energy emanates from thermonuclear reactions in the sun; makes things grow, i.e. do work; is the driving force of evolution, and the means of economic activity in human social affairs; it can be transformed and or stored in many forms, e.g. solar energy, nuclear energy, light, heat, kinetic energy, potential energy, etc.; is the central component in all of science, e.g. chemistry: activation energy, entropy, bond energy, etc., or thermodynamics: internal energy, Gibbs free energy, etc.; it is equivalent to mass: E=mc² and has its mysteries, e.g. dark energy or bosons (energy).

In science, energy, from the Greek ενεργεια “force in action”, is a concept that refers to the capacity of matter to perform work as the result of its motion or its position in relation to forces acting on it. In physics, energy refers to amount of work physical systems can do on each another. In thermodynamics, the science of energy, energy characterizes the ability of a system to modify the state of its surroundings. The laws of thermodynamics, e.g. the conservation of energy, define its potential operations. In biology, adenosine triphosphate, is the universal energy currency of all known living organisms. The term "energy" was first used in the modern sense by Thomas Young. Presently, energy is widely used in various spheres of life and many meanings are often ascribed to it. Quantities of energy, in general, are useful functions to explain changes that characterize natural processes and phenomena. With a recent decline in amount of available or sustainable fossil fuels, alternative energy development technologies, e.g. wind power, wave power, or electric power, etc., are at the forefront of the current technological drive.

History

Main article: History of energy

In the history of science, the definition, conception, and history of energy, referring to a “dynamic quality”, has a long and illustrious past tracing its origins, essentially, to the construction of the world’s first steam engine in 1697 by English engineer Thomas Savery, and before that it originated as a word for work (1599). Energy is a centerpiece in both the history of thermodynamics and the history of chemistry. The term “energy” was first in the modern sense in 1807 by English polymath Thomas Young who used the word as a replacement for the older term vis viva as developed by originally by German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, defined as the product of the mass of an object and its velocity squared. The new term energy, however, soon gained central status with the development of the first and second laws of thermodynamics in the 1840s and 50s, by those as James Joule, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Rudolf Clausius.

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External links

• What does energy really mean? - Physics World
• Weekly Energy Articles - Our-energy.com
• Glossary of Energy Terms - California Emissions Commission
• Glossary of Energy Terms – U.S. Energy Information Administration

Comments

Since you seem to be editing in the Discussion tab of this article I'll ad my comment here.

I very much like the big picture you draw in the sunflower caption. Its along the lines of what I want to see when a reader first looks up Energy in Wikipedia, something grand and inspiational. Well done , nice work. Lumos3 19:53, 13 June 2007 (UTC)