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What is energy? Some say its just a very useful quantity. But its also a very important concept. Its used everywhete in physics. Did we just some day randomly came up with something like F.S and declared it a very useful quantity or (1/2)mv^2 or other formulas. How did these ideads generate? I want its history. I read Feynman's explanation of energy.Read from what i could find. But still i do not understand.

Qmechanic
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Shamunayer
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    If you want the history of the concept of energy, maybe your question is better suited for History of Science StackExchange. – Jeanbaptiste Roux Oct 15 '23 at 08:57
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    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_energy and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_thermodynamics are good places to start. – gandalf61 Oct 15 '23 at 09:09
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    We've pretty strict standards for behavior here, so please mind your language. There's also a "be nice" rule (well, rules). This isn't Reddit or Twitter (or whatever the chief Twit has renamed it this week - that's an example of me pushing the limits of what's polite here, by the way). – StephenG - Help Ukraine Oct 15 '23 at 09:09
  • If you have read Feynman on what is energy, you should have already understood that what Feynman said is true. I recommend watching Kathy Loves Physics on this topic and also the documentary mentioned in the section on du Chatelet. They are really good and clear. – naturallyInconsistent Oct 15 '23 at 09:30
  • The concept of energy has had an arduous history. There was a preceding concept which was called 'vis viva', the living force. Vis viva was defined as $mv^2$ Until about the 1840's or 1850's the thinking revolved around the quantity $mv^2$. That meant that in order to compare change of potential energy to change of vis viva a factor of 2 had to be taken into account. The thing is: in physics textbooks remnants of centuries of struggle survive to this day. My hypothesis: while new physics textbooks are being written all the time, derivations tend to be copied over and over, without new thought. – Cleonis Oct 15 '23 at 09:36
  • Possible duplicates: https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/3014/2451 and links therein. – Qmechanic Oct 15 '23 at 09:55
  • If you are not satisfied with what Feynman (who is widely regarded as an astounding scientist and science educator) could explain to you about energy, I dare suggest that our humble explanations will not satisfy you either, unless you make your question a lot more specific. But anyway. Symmetries of a physical system imply that several mathematical quantities are conserved. We decided to call some of them momentum, some energy. So that's what energy is, a conserved quantity that's very convenient to keep track of – Barbaud Julien Oct 15 '23 at 09:58

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