It's as made up as time, but it's as real as anything can be understood to be, with emphasis on 'understood'. It doesn't exist in actuality mostly because our words and models don't describe it even close to well enough to consider the actual thing. It's like a really poor translation of a word, it might get us closer to understanding what's going on but will never be if your goal is to describe it to something like the human mind.
this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2025
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If a one-ton boulder rolls down an Earthly hill in my direction and I don't move, what happens is not a manmade concept. Call it what you will.
Time on the other hand exists only as a useful mental tool to describe change. When I repeat the experiment of going to sleep, when I wake up it's still always now. That experiment -always- produces the same result.
Well, technically the 'now' experiment only works one time. Of you exclude time as an assumption there isn't another location to place previous or subsequent results.
Isn't another location
"previous" and "subsequent" locations in space are memory phenomena, High-energy location changes are closer together in memory. Our "time" is a bookshelf of physical events in space, one following another. Of course they're sequential, so it was convenient to 'measure' the 'distance' between the books for purposes of prediction. But we've invented that ruler, then forgot we made it up. Many indigenous people have no 'time', and they manage.
Energy is not really manmade. It's not a physical object, but that doesn't mean that we invented it. It's a pattern of behavior that we gave a name to. Whether we notice the pattern or not, the pattern is still there.
It's the same as gravity - it's not a physical object, it's a pattern that describes how massive objects interact. But you wouldn't argue that gravity doesn't exist, would you?
On the risk of looking like a lunatic philosopher, yes, I'd argue that gravity doesn't exist.
Even if energy is not manmade, the concept of energy is, or in other words: we invented this concept in order to more easily understand phenomena around us.
I see a lot of replies saying that "energy is in all things and is immutable", but we (at least I) can imagine a scenario where someone invents a whole new system to describe nature which might not use the concept of energy at all (or any other concept you choose, such as gravity). The nature can be the same but the way we describe it can vary wildly (more likely beyond human comprehension).