In physics and other sciences, energy (from the Greek lang: ἐνέργεια - energeia, "activity, operation", from lang: ἐνεργός - energos, "active, working") is a scalar physical quantity, an attribute of objects and systems that is conserved in nature. In physics textbooks energy is often defined as the ability to do work.

Several different forms of energy, including, but not limited to, kinetic, potential, thermal, gravitational, sound energy, light energy, elastic, electromagnetic, chemical, nuclear, and mass have been defined to explain all known natural phenomena.

While one form of energy may be transformed to another, the total energy remains the same. This principle, the conservation of energy, was first postulated in the early 19th century, and applies to any isolated system. According to Noether's theorem, the conservation of energy is a consequence of the fact that the laws of physics do not change over time.

Although the total energy of a system does not change with time, its value may depend on the frame of reference. For example, a seated passenger in a moving airplane has zero kinetic energy relative to the airplane, but non-zero kinetic energy relative to the earth.

History

The word "energy" derives from Greek ἐνέργεια (energeia), which appears for the first time in the work Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle in the 4th century BC. In 1021 AD, the Arabian physicist, Alhazen, in the Book of Optics, held light rays to be streams of minute energy particles, stating that "the smallest parts of light" retain "only properties that can be treated by geometry and verified by experiment" and that "they lack all sensible qualities except energy." In 1121, Al-Khazini, in The Book of the Balance of Wisdom, proposed that the gravitational potential energy of a body varies depending on its distance from the centre of the Earth.

The concept of energy emerged out of the idea of vis viva, which Leibniz defined as the product of the mass of an object and its velocity squared; he believed that total vis viva was conserved. To account for slowing due to friction, Leibniz claimed that heat consisted of the random motion of the constituent parts of matter — a view shared by Isaac Newton, although it would be more than a century until this was generally accepted. In 1807, Thomas Young was the first to use the term "energy" instead of vis viva, in its modern sense. Gustave-Gaspard Coriolis described "kinetic energy" in 1829 in its modern sense, and in 1853, William Rankine coined the term "potential energy." It was argued for some years whether energy was a substance (the caloric) or merely a physical quantity, such as momentum.

He¹ amalgamated all of these laws into the laws of thermodynamics, which aided in the rapid development of explanations of chemical processes using the concept of energy by Rudolf Clausius, Josiah Willard Gibbs, and Walther Nernst. It also led to a mathematical formulation of the concept of entropy by Clausius and to the introduction of laws of radiant energy by Jožef Stefan.