I found this assumption in this paper: 'Energy: Between Physics and Metaphysics', Mario Bunge. I am intrigued as to what is the latest on this approach.
As a practicing scientist, it is hard to put energy in the same category as space and time, which is what I found Bunge´s strategy to be.
Energy is a property of a physical system as measured in a particular frame - not necessarily a single object, but a collection of objects in relation to each other from a certain vantage point. For example, two massive objects separated by a distance have gravitational potential energy.
The objects may or may not be "material" in the sense of "made out of matter;" non-matter, such as photons, can have energy too.
The amount of energy depends on the frame. In Newtonian physics we prefer to look at "inertial frames." An inertial frame is a system of coordinates that is not accelerating. In one inertial frame, an object may be stationary and have zero kinetic energy. In another inertial frame, the same object may be moving very fast and have a very high kinetic energy. We have no way to prefer one inertial frame over another, so the amount of kinetic energy an object has is undetermined until we decide on a frame. This also applies to blueshifted or redshifted light; the amount of energy in a photon depends on the frame chosen.
The picture gets more complicated when we look at general relativity. In general relativity, energy is not necessarily conserved, and it becomes difficult to identify exactly how much energy there is. See this article or this article. There are also difficulties with energy conservation in quantum mechanics, but in the many-worlds interpretation it is conserved.
So, in summary, energy is:
The pedagogy of physics begins with a presentation of energy as a dichotomy between kinetic energy and potential energy. This dichotomy presupposes a "configuration space" of "points" presumably correlated with a three dimensional real space. There is no such thing as an "absolute potential." Potential energy is understood as a system of differences correlated with the configuration space by virtue of a coherent vector field of force. Kinetic energy is understood as a system of arcs correlated with the configuration space by virtue of an unwitnessable algebraic dimension parameterizing the assumption of arc connectedness.
In the fourth bulletted example of the link,
http://nlab-pages.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/nlab/show/gauge%20space#examples
you will find that every topology defines a quasigauge space (not the same "gauge"). Importantly, the formulas used to make this definition contrast "discernibility" with a denial of discernibility. I emphasize this because the use of differences to represent potential energy must be coherent with the role of the law of identity implicit to the use of a real space as the configuration space.
Note that the denial of the discernibility relation yields the reflexive order of a conditional relation without expressing the singular character of an "individuated" "point." To my knowledge, which could certainly be in error, gauge equivalence in the usual sense is not "singular." Manifolds are understood with respect to charts and charts are coherently overlapped by stipulating smoothness conditions. And the fact that this denial is associated with an order is compatible with the fact that the witnessed continuum is dynamic.
With this mention of a quasigauge and charts, one sees a subtle change from the original pedagogy. Nevertheless, the basic idea of a real space is retained for the configuration space.
At present, forces different from gravity are understood with respect to a specific multiplication between group representations. The factors of such multiplications are presumably irreducible. So, the first simplification toward the original pedagogy is to consider the factors separately.
The relationship between a group representation and a group realization is that the representation is simply a form of the group which can act on the configuration space because its elements are specifically chosen to be linear tranformations over that space.
Again, one sees a subtle change from the original pedagogy. Some constructions used to explain force along these lines invoke complex spaces. But, I am fairly certain that stipulations involving Hessian forms secure applicability to real spaces.
What is important about acknowledging the use of group realizations, however, is to understand the relationship between an abstract group, the realization of an abstract group, and what is meant by a "quantity."
Cayley's theorem asserts that every abstract group is realizable by a transformation group. Transformation groups are understood as actions applied to "sets" or "domains of discourse (using 'discourse' rather than 'definition' to emphasize ontology)." A "quantity" is any object from this underlying set. And, the proof of Cayley's theorem is based upon taking the parameters of the abstract group, itself, as "quantities." In combinatorial group theory, parameters are not "denoting symbols."
While I am not a physicist, I see nothing in this analysis of the pedagogy corresponding to "material objects." The only "objectual ontology" involved refers to mathematical representations whose definiteness is made questionable by the independence of the continuum hypothesis.
It is true that relativistic physics and quantized energy alters things somewhat. In both cases, the mathematics attributing momentum to light has had its consequences. The evolution from Newtonian laws of motion through Lagrangian laws of motion to Hamiltonian laws relating laws of motion directly to energy occurred before the modern theories. But, they do not alter the basic pedagogy, and, the current theories are not yet reconciled.
And, if Susskind is to be trusted, the evolution of paradigms introduces mathematical artifacts without physical meaning in some cases.
Conifold asks why energy cannot be construed like velocity, momentum. or angular momentum. All three of these are understood as vectors. The relationship between position, momentum, and the uncertainty principle in quantum physics has an analogue with time and energy. However, there is no time observable in the equations of quantum physics to the best of my knowledge. This difference suggests that energy is incomparable with these vector fields because of its involvement with the pedagogical presuppositions. The transfer of force, mediated by bosons, is signaled by changed momentum (kinetic energy). This measurement can only be performed in a manner cohering with the fact that potential energy is only understood through differences at different positions. It is not that energy "jumps." It is that energy cannot be understood in the sense of an "objectual ontology" simply because it can be assigned numerical valuation.
Frog suggests that material objects are properties of energy. This analysis of the pedagogy, if reasonably correct, portrays energy as an essential undefinable required as a prerequisite to any description of the witnessable trajectories we attribute to the phenomena we call material objects. If energy has properties, it cannot be such an essential undefinable (if my understanding of such notions in philosophy is correct).
Causative has given a very good answer --- much better than mine. But, my understanding of physics is severely limited. I do not believe my answer is in conflict with that one.
I believe this answer probably supports your disagreement with what you perceive Bunge's article (which I have not read) to have said.
With regard to the role of real numbers, you might find "sets of uniqueness" from descriptive set theory of interest. This is what Cantor had been studying before going down the path of completed infinities.
Bunge calls himself an exact philosopher. In the above paper he says:
Because it is ubiquitous, the concept of energy is philosophical and in particular, metaphysical (ontological). That is it belongs in the same league as the concepts of thing, property, event and process, causation and chance, law and trend and many others.
He that sggests:
Energy = changeability
Now, Aristotle defined physics as the study of change and he identified change with an aspect of time. Physics itself thinks of energy as correlated with time symmetry. He also goes to deduce:
Energy is a property - not a thing, state or process
He further says:
Because energy is a property, it can be represented by either a function or an operator.
You are saying you find it difficult to put energy in the same category as space and time. Kant would agree. Nevertheless, Bunge is saying given the universality of energy, it is of the same ontological category as space and time.
See:
The 19th century thermodynamicist-engineer William Macquorn Rankine had a very Aristotelian understanding of energy; cf. his "Outlines of the Science of Energetics". He coined the term "potential energy", basing it upon Aristotelian terminology (quoted in ibid. p. 208):
The step which I took in 1853, of applying the distinction between “Actual Energy” and “Potential Energy,” not to motion and mechanical power alone, but to all kinds of physical phenomena, was suggested to me, I think, by Aristotle’s use of the words δύναμις [dynamis, strength, power] and ἐνέργεια [energeia, "in" + "work", actuality].
Also, read about the dynamism (everything energy) vs. atomism (everything matter) debate, discussed in Cosmology treatise 2, question 1, articles 2 & 3, by Hugon, O.P.; and the other articles here.
Is energy a physical property of material objects?
From a physics perspective, an objects mass is a physical property of an object. Mass and energy are equivalent through Einstein's famous equation so in this manner, energy is a physical property of a material
Philosophers will give you answers; metaphysicians will give you choices.
For a physicalist, extension is a primary presumption, and so baked into metaphysical presumption that runs along the line that because a property is a function of extension, things are inside or outside of an object. This is often a very comfortable claim. For instance, the chemical energy of an object, that is, the energy contained in the bonds of an object are literally a function of the connections between smaller extensions within a larger extension. (I use extension instead of volume on the account that QM allows for one to quibble over exactly what constitutes a volume of a particle).
So, in this case, it seems clear cut according to standard metaphysical presupposition, the chemical energy of a match head, for instance, is a property of the match head. Different match heads will thus have different dispositions (SEP) as a function of the characteristics of the match head. This is a very intuitive approach to understanding energy, so much so, that any elementary-level student can understand these claims.
But what about the case of the potential energy of the match head? When it is at rest on the surface of a table, the normal vector and the gravitational vector are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction leading to dynamic equilibrium. So, one is reasonable when one claims there is no gravitational potential energy (GPE). But along comes the bright student and says, but take away the table, it will suddenly have GPE; she asks the teacher, where did it come from? And suddenly things get relativistic. Thus, if one accepts that an object has GPE, one has to at least contemplate if GPE inheres to the object (which would be considered a realist claim) or whether it is somehow transferred to the object from a field (also a realist claim), or maybe even that it doesn't exist in a technically physical sense and is fictive (an instrumentalist claim). Thus, you find yourself in the debate regarding scientific realism and anti-realism (SEP) which occurs in other contexts, such as Platonism versus constructivism. Are circles real or fictional?
The question, then of exactly what energy is just got philosophically interesting! Is energy directly detectable by the senses, or are the phenomena that we used energy to describe descriptions, and energy is nothing but a mathematical model that is descriptive? If one says that mass is real, but energy is not, how does one deal with mass-energy equivalence? Note, this is the same sort of brain-twister that one finds oneself asking whether or not wave functions are real and exist; and what if one believes that energy is fictive, a construct of the mind but the objects they describe are real? Now you're creeping into questions of mind-body duality. Oh boy.
And what's fair to say is that today, with the emphasis on holism, that is, seeing systems instead of isolated objects, one can suspect immediately that Duhem and Quine cooked up confirmation holism as a recognition of this sort of metaphysical morass, and why your average working scientist just steers clear of the philosophy of science.
So, if you've left with more questions than answers, welcome to metaphysics. ;)
Maxwell said
- Energy not capable of Identification
We cannot identify a particular portion of energy, or trace it through its transformations. It has no individual existence, such as that which we attribute to particular portions of matter.
—Matter and Motion, Dover, New York, 1991, p. 90,
cited in Universe without [Reified] Space and Time ch. 4
Bunge is not proposing to equate energy to a spatiotemporal category: in C2R2 he's defining the ontological dependency of energy on space-time (and seems there are no further contradictions):
E(c, x, t, f, u)
The problem is that such function has a large metaphysical load. The idea of changeability or potential for change is old, is essentially metaphysical and, like things, which are a macroscopic phenomenon, is to be addressed physically AND metaphysically to be consistent (alternative definitions of energy don't usually allow such approach).
For instance. "I have one apple" can be formally a=1. That would be the equivalent of a definition of energy in physics: a formal statement that appears to have internal consistency (internal to empirical formal facts, that is, to science). The problem is that such proposition cannot be used in a scientific complex construct, because it is eminently metaphysical (worst even, mathematics and logic are part of metaphysics). So, it cannot be used scientifically to calculate the amount of apples in an experiment unless the precise definition of apple is stated.
Solution 1: use a physical definition: define an apple as "a thing that weighs 100g". Seems OK for simple calculations. But when taken strictly, a=1 is never true because the apple is constantly losing humidity, and tends to lose weight along time so, any precise measure (science demands precision) will be flawed.
Solution 2: Admit error in the physical definition. The classical solution is to use a range: "an apple is a thing that weighs 70g to 100g". But then, if you have a result of 1000g, you can't know how many apples would you have, if 10, 11, 12, 13 or 14.
Solution 3: Bunge's solution is to include metaphysics on the formalization: "An apple is a system that looks like an apple, tastes like an apple and weighs like an apple", which is what any scientist would be doing when affirming that a=1. Then, the definition has now sense, as well as the definition of energy.
Although, evidently, "tastes like an apple" seems worst, because it has a large metaphysical load. But there's no alternative: this is how mathematics works, like it or not. Anyway, from the first instant, the word "thing" (purely metaphysical) has been used in all definitions.
Any physical entity has inevitably two components: the physical, objective, and the metaphysical, subjective. Currently, science just takes the metaphysical for granted. Bunge is precisely addressing such issue, which produces evident inconsistencies on the understanding and application (Bunge grants major relevance to scientific application) of the concept energy.
What Bunge is doing is just formalizing the metaphysical component, even if it seems strange. In any other case, it is impossible to use the concepts of apple or energy in a consistent way, which is necessary for making science.
Metaphysics is the elephant in the room of science.
Bunge’s paper, and premise are interesting. They also provide an example of one of the many wrongheaded ways to do philosophy.
Bunge is a Physicalist, and he is engaged in the Physicalist project. Daniel Stoljar, in his recent book on Physicalism, noted that philosophy for most of the 20th century had been under a triple threat of irrelevance – from Science on one side, Linguistics on a second, and Mathematics on a third – absorbing most of the traditional subjects of philosophic thinking. Physicalism, as a worldview, however, offered something for philosophers to DO. This is because there are so many aspects of our world that don’t seem to be purely physical – Physicalist philosophers can take on the task of trying to explain how they “really” are (or at least could be). IE – Physicalist philosophers can take on the traditionally religious role of apologism for a worldview. Stoljar proposes this USEFULLNESS was a major sociologic reason for the popularity of Physicalism among philosophers.
Both philosophy and science have given Physicalists a lot of apologism to do, over the last century of the popularity of Physicalism. Physicalism was initially adopted as a stand in for Materialism, when Materialists realized that physics had basically refuted materialism, as there were lots of things considered real by physicists (fields, massless “particles”) that were basically not “material”. But matter was a “something” to assert as an ontologic claim. Physics is an ACTIVITY and is just a STUDY of a subset of our world, those things that fit a particular category of study methodology. This ACTIVITY is simply not the sort of thing that can support an ontology. And “the things physicists study”, is far too vague and changeable to be an ontology. This is articulated in “Hempel’s Dilemma” – that any definition of the subject of physics that has content (IE can exclude anything) can be shown to be false if one asserts that is all there is in the world. Also, philosophers have basically concluded that one CANNOT reduce abstract objects to the physical, and most Physicalists today have settled, like Bunge did in this paper, for accepting that abstract objects are real, but claiming that they cannot be causal. Physicalists, therefore, have has to scale back their goal from being a monistic ontology, to simply denying the independent existence or causal nature of consciousness.
In addition to these philosophic challenges, physics and science have provided challenges as well. When materialism and physicalism were initially conceived, laws and relations in science were thought of as absolute, and essences. Science has since abandoned essentialism – and instead treats laws and objects as contingent and best guesses, and as only regularities, not absolutes. The cited essay from Feynman on energy demonstrated the abandonment of essences “we have no idea what energy is, if anything”. Feynman still asserted the absolutism of laws, but decades have passed since, and Bunge himself noted that conservation of energy is now known not to hold in several crucial circumstances. This paper notes how ALL laws will spontaneously break https://www.pnas.org/content/93/25/14256. And for a room temperature example of breaking conservation of energy, see time crystals: https://www.popsci.com/science/what-is-time-crystal-physics/ And not only have physicists abandoned conservation laws, in particular in cosmology, they also explicitly assume that events in cosmology can violate causal closure, or be uncaused. In addition to abandoning absolute laws, physicists have also assumed that at least some aspects of math are causal on matter. This is explicit among those physicists who think that matter reduces to math https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-universe-made-of-math-excerpt/. Less explicit than Tegmark, but still implicit -- the “shut up and calculate” of most Quantum Mechanics Copenhagen Interpretation physicists, is treating the math rather than any theory, as the fundamental nature of matter. And the main justification given for the Everett Many Worlds interpretation is – “the worlds are there in the math” – IE math creates not just our world, but infinite worlds. Informational and hologrammic interpretation of quantum mechanics, make a different abstraction, information, the substrate for matter. Also, science has now abandoned reductionism as a general principle – see the last section of Scientific Reduction https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-reduction/. If other sciences are NOT reducible to physics, then their causation is not reducible to physics – which further challenges causal closure. If norms change, and norms are very much of an abstract object – then societies change. This is explicit causation in the world due to an abstraction. Science assumes that the physical universe is not causally closed.
These trends in science and philosophy have given Physicalists a LOT they need to work on. Bunge wisely has focused on only one of these multiple issues, conservation of energy, basically trying to eat the elephant one bite at a time.
His choice to try to restore conservation of energy has a purpose – this “law” is cited by all but one of the Physicalists who wrote for the compilation “The Myth of an Afterlife”, as a crucial reason why dualist consciousness cannot exist. The one exception actually asked some physicists, who told him “energy is not conserved” (the rest did not ask). And as denial of agency to consciousness is almost all that is left of the prior grand project of physicalism – abandoning the main argument used against consciousness agency is a good first bite for Bunge to want to start with.
The approach Bunge took – THAT is not so sensible. Philosophy, and its subset of metaphysics, are subjects that other fields EMERGE from, when a subject gets understood well enough to be treated as its own separate discipline. Philosophical concepts and methods – are efforts to make sense of the remaining crucial questions, after the subjects we DO grasp well have been taken care of by other specialists. Philosophy and metaphysics therefore are INCAPABLE of providing precision and definitiveness to any remote degree comparable to fields like physics and literary criticism. Trying to rope philosophy and metaphysics to the task of finding a way to conserve energy, when physics has said it is NOT conserved – is an impossible task for the discipline. Terms in philosophy cannot be defined in the precise way they can be in physics – and therefore they cannot be measured, and even plausibly meet a “conservation law” in principle, much less in practice. The entire program reflects a gross misunderstanding of what philosophy and metaphysics ARE.
As to whether energy can be treated as a property of concrete things, or as “changeability” – these are two DIFFERENT concepts, and one simply cannot make them equivalent. Physicists already know that fields are not properties of “concrete things”, and that energy can both be an aspect of a field, and can be intrinsic to the RELATIONSHIP between objects, IE is not just associated with “concrete things” but also with less concrete things, and with relations between those things. So the “physical property” definition for energy would require redefining multiple concepts that are well understood in physics, to be even remotely plausible. And those redefinitions would be incompatible with physics, and not capable of being counted and conserved, for subjects outside physics. Changeability is a logic state. And logic states are – per Bunge’s own list of his proposed laws – not capable of carrying energy. Bunge is therefore pursuing two different and incompatible claims simultaneously, and neither of them are able to cohere.
And a further failing, not only is energy not plausibly limited to “material objects” but a “physical property” is itself an incoherent concept. Relationships, which ARE properties of “material objects” appear not to be “physical”, but logical/relational. And it is in relationships, that much energy is found.
So – one is unlikely to find much subsequent work building on Bunge’s ideas here, as they are – incoherent, contradictory, and in conflict with science.
