why is many types fo Energy

Question: why is many types fo Energy
- Keywords:
  energy
Asked by anon-253669 on 11 May 2020.
- James Smallcombe answered on 11 May 2020: last edited 11 May 2020 8:48 am
  
  Mostly energy can be called potential (energy that can be released such as the gravitational potential of holding something heavy in the air) and kinetic (the energy something has in moving, be that movement of solid objects, atoms or even photons of light).
  In general energy is just energy, it is one quantity measured in the standard unit joule (symbol J), but the universe is full of complex systems and its useful to group things based on situation.
  The different classifications of energy we usually list, such as gravitational, chemical, electrical etc are all different situation specific expressions of the more general nebulous concept of energy. Usually we classify energy based on the force that the energy corresponds to, so the answer to your question is because there are different forces.
  I hope that helps a little.
- Ashleigh Barron answered on 11 May 2020:
  
  There are many types of energy to describe what the current state the energy is in but its all essentially the same. Energy is conserved it cannot be destroyed it just transfers from one to another. If something possess energy we say this has the ability to do work, work is the amount of energy transferred and is related to force as Work (measured as energy) = Force x Distance. As James said energy can be grouped as potential or kinetic. Potential energy is stored energy, such as energy stored in a battery (we call this chemical energy) or gravitational potential energy such as a ball at the top of a hill waiting to be released. Kinetic energy is normally related to movement such as when the ball is released from the top of the hill and starts rolling down we call this mechanical energy. Heat is a type of kinetic energy as its the movement of particles. Hope this helps.
- Sophia Pells answered on 11 May 2020:
  
  Like other scientists have already said, a lot of the different types of energy are just names we’ve created to help us understand what’s going on in different situations when really they’re all just energy. It just makes it easier for us to think about more specific types of energy when we do calculations.
- Rosie Hayward answered on 11 May 2020:
  
  To help understand why energy is either classed as potential or kinetic, it may be helpful to think about what energy is.
  
  Einstein showed us that energy is equivalent to mass, for an object at rest:
  
  E=mc^2 (E=m x c x c).
  
  Here, c is the speed of light, which is constant. If an object is not at rest, the equation is
  
  E^2 = m^2 c^4 + p^2 c^2 (E x E = m x m x c x c x c x c + p x p x c x c).
  
  Above, p is the momentum. This equation is always true, which means fundamentally in physics, energy depends on how much mass an object has, or the fact it is moving. When physicists talk about types of potential energy, they are talking about the energy which comes from mass. When physicists talk about kinetic energy, they are talking about the energy which comes from motion.
  
  But why is energy conserved, and why is it fundamentally linked to either mass or motion?
  
  It all comes from symmetries of space and time. The laws of physics which tell us about space and time can be thought of as ‘symmetric’ in some ways. A very clever mathematician named Emmy Noether showed that these kinds of symmetry lead to conservation laws, like the conservation of energy.
  
  Einstein then went on to show that the conservation of energy and the conservation of mass are linked, which then led to the equations above.
  
  I hope this helps you understand what energy is, and why there are different kinds!
- Scott Lawrie answered on 12 May 2020:
  
  That’s a great question, actually, and can get very deep and complicated to answer! Basically, energy is just the thing needed for stuff to do ‘work’. By work, I mean either moving, heating up, making noise or changing in other ways. So energy is moved from one place to another, and when it does, something interesting happens! Energy can be moved around or stored up in lots of ways: gravity, light, chemicals, electricity, nuclear… the only rule is that energy can never be created or destroyed: it just gets transformed from one type to another. So for example, your car burns petrol (chemical energy) to turn the wheels (kinetic energy). As to WHY there are many types of energy, well it would be a bit of a boring world if all you had was a lump of coal but no way of burning it to create heat and light, so it’s quite lucky there ARE lots of types! 🙂
- Sarah-May Gould answered on 15 May 2020:
  
  This is such a good question. One of my (non-scientist) friends asked me recently what energy is and I had to think about it before answering because the concept of energy is something we take completely for granted in physics but actually it’s quite a subtle concept. The way that I explained it to her in the end is that you can think of it as a counter that we use to keep track of how objects interact with each other. For instance if you push an object and it starts to move, you have transferred energy to it (and in this case we call that energy kinetic energy). Like other people have said, the different types of energy are really just different names so we can keep track of things, they don’t change what the energy actually is.

Question: why is many types fo Energy

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