Time and Energy

I was chatting earlier and got into a discussion about physics, the description of reality, and energy. The person I was chatting with appeared to take the position that physics can account for everything—all phenomena can be described in terms of energy. I mentioned that we’re not even sure what energy is, but he claimed that energy is a signal is information. But, I protested, this is mere tautology: it tells us nothing more about what energy is than the fact that maybe we have more than one word for it.

So I look up energy, and the Wikipedia entry has a great quote of Richard Feynman:

“There is a fact, or if you wish, a law, governing natural phenomena that are known to date. There is no known exception to this law; it is exact, so far we know. The law is called conservation of energy; it states that there is a certain quantity, which we call energy, that does not change in manifold changes which nature undergoes. That is a most abstract idea, because it is a mathematical principle; it says that there is a numerical quantity, which does not change when something happens. It is not a description of a mechanism, or anything concrete; it is just a strange fact that we can calculate some number, and when we finish watching nature go through her tricks and calculate the number again, it is the same.”

So, energy, as understood by physics, is ultimately without any properties other than a corresponding number. However, it also has many different appearances, and it is transition from one form to another that appears as motion or activity, and has more to do with the word’s etymology as “active,” “operation,” and “working.” Thus, there is a seeming paradox when it comes to energy: relative to a defined frame of reference, the activity of energy in a given space over time creates the phenomena that manifests within that space; however, the energy of the system remains identical to itself—it does not change. So what we find about energy appears to be that it changes in space over time, but it doesn’t change at all.

I also chatted with this person about how we don’t really understand what time is. Hir position was that we did, and that it could be understood as steps of progress in mutations, which seems to have intuitive merit; however, this merit, it seems to me, is based upon our perceptions of experiences as embedded within time, and not an understanding of time itself. Given that ‘space-time’ has no properties, but instead defines the dimensions of the system or structure in which energy exists, and that energy is merely some unchanging number, I’m not sure how we come to an understanding of what time is beyond a product of our own perceptions of something that, ultimately, does not change.

In other words, time makes no damn sense at all. And yet, this absurdity seems to be our reality.