I remember as a kid being very confused whether potential energy was "real" and why it was treated as real by basically everyone despite being unobserved and seemingly unnecessary in a model of...
I remember as a kid being very confused whether potential energy was "real" and why it was treated as real by basically everyone despite being unobserved and seemingly unnecessary in a model of physics. There are parts of science where things were proposed and then later were definitely directly observed and proven to be a thing in reality (like atoms), so I thought potential energy was supposed to fit the pattern too and I was confused that no one was concerned with directly observing potential energy.
I like this essay for emphasizing at the end that the concept of energy (including potential energy) isn't necessarily meant to be a claim that that it exists as a fundamental entity in reality. Potential energy wouldn't be "wrong" if we found out the fundamental rules of reality didn't explicitly represent and track it, the same way negative numbers aren't "wrong" despite seemingly not existing directly in reality. (Though potential energy would be "wrong" in some way if we found that some calculations involving it gave the wrong answers.) They're both just mathematical tools that we've found help us simplify computing some results about reality.
I remember as a kid being very confused whether potential energy was "real" and why it was treated as real by basically everyone despite being unobserved and seemingly unnecessary in a model of physics. There are parts of science where things were proposed and then later were definitely directly observed and proven to be a thing in reality (like atoms), so I thought potential energy was supposed to fit the pattern too and I was confused that no one was concerned with directly observing potential energy.
I like this essay for emphasizing at the end that the concept of energy (including potential energy) isn't necessarily meant to be a claim that that it exists as a fundamental entity in reality. Potential energy wouldn't be "wrong" if we found out the fundamental rules of reality didn't explicitly represent and track it, the same way negative numbers aren't "wrong" despite seemingly not existing directly in reality. (Though potential energy would be "wrong" in some way if we found that some calculations involving it gave the wrong answers.) They're both just mathematical tools that we've found help us simplify computing some results about reality.