Читать книгу Energy Medicine - C. Norman Shealy - Страница 9

In one sense, everything that we know, see, think, feel, or do is energy. Energy can be considered either potential or kinetic. “Potential” energy is that which is stored and inert but has the potential for generating some manifested form of energy. For instance, wood has potential energy to provide heat directly to heat water or create steam. “Kinetic” energy is active energy, having expressed the energy actively, such as electricity; it’s the power to induce change or do work. In one sense, energy is considered to be either a particle or a wave, and even that is debatable as light moves both as particles (photons) and in waves.

In our common use of the term, we think of energy as force, vigor, power, action, or strength. Even our mental ability to use our will in making decisions is a use of energy. More scientific terms are thermal, gravitational, sound, light, elastic, electromagnetic, etc. A theorem by German mathematician Amalie Emmy Noether meshed with Einstein’s relativity to show that the conservation of energy is a consequence of the fact that laws of physics do not change over time; therefore, any form of energy can be transformed into another form, but the total amount of energy always remains the same. As difficult as it is to understand, energy can neither be created nor destroyed, so that the potential energy in coal or wood or gasoline, which is inert, can be converted to heat or, in a more complicated system, into electricity to produce lights or run a motor vehicle—but no energy is lost and no new energy is created.