Energy 'made of what'?

For scientists, energy is not really "a thing" so it is impossible to say what it is "made of" in the way we think, for example, that a house is made of bricks.

If it isn't something, then what is energy? Energy is like a power. Capacity here is the ability to do something.

A musician has the ability to compose music, similarly, a painter has the ability to draw pictures. Energy is the ability of an object to do something.

An object does something when it exerts a force on another object, pushing that object to move in a certain direction. What does that mean?

To answer this question, let's imagine someone throws a ball at you and you hit it with a stick. When the stick hits the ball, the stick changes the speed and direction of the ball's movement.

When you hit a ball with a stick, the stick transfers part of its kinetic energy to the ball to change the ball's speed and direction (Illustration: Getty).

Energy is the ability the bat has to change the direction of the ball. When the bat is swung, it can change the direction of any ball it hits.

When you swing the club, you transfer the energy stored in your muscles to the club. The harder you swing, the harder the club works and the more energy it carries.

Forms of energy

There are many ways for an object to function, so there are many different types of energy.

Above, we mentioned one type: the swinging motion of a stick. This type of energy is called kinetic energy. This is the energy that an object has due to its motion.

Another type of energy is potential energy. Potential energy is the ability an object has to do something because of its position relative to other objects. This means that placing objects in certain locations gives them energy.

Let's look at a fun example: imagine that we put a basin of water on top of a half-closed door; When someone pushes the door open and walks in, the pot will fall on that person's head.

Since the pot is on the door, it can fall down. And when it falls, it can do something. In addition to wetting the person who walks through the door, it also hits that person on the head. Thus, the pot has the power to do something only because it is located on the door, not because it moves. That capacity of the pot is potential energy.

If you place a basin of water firmly on a door, you give the basin potential energy. When the door opened, the pot began to move and fall, "harming" whoever was unlucky enough to open that door (Photo: Shutterstock).

Einstein's famous equation

The erudite physicist Albert Einstein came up with an energy equation that you probably already know: E=mc2 .

In this equation, E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light.

This equation says that energy is equal to mass multiplied by a certain number. So isn't energy made up of something? Not really, because some objects that have no mass can still have energy. For example, light. We know light has energy because we capture light energy in solar panels and turn it into electricity.

However, light is made from extremely small particles called photons, and photons have no mass.

Thus, if energy is created by mass, then light has no energy. This will create a mystery about solar energy. But it turns out that even though light has no mass, it still has something called momentum, which makes it capable of doing work, or doing something.

Mass, energy and momentum

There is a more complicated version of the equation that Einstein came up with, showing the relationship between mass and momentum.

Light has super fast speed, it goes from the Sun to Earth in just over 8 seconds (Photo: Shutterstock).

One very important thing we need to know is that light moves extremely fast. Because the amount of energy in an object depends on the object's mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light, just a little bit of matter carries a lot of energy.

It only takes 1 second for light to travel nearly 300 million meters, which means one kilogram of mass is equivalent to nearly 9 million billion joules (J) of energy, or the number 9 with 18 zeros after it: 9,000,000,000,000,000,000 J.

The problem lies in how to release that energy. This actually requires the way nuclear bombs and nuclear energy work: they release the energy contained in matter to create enormous effects/energy.