Physicists eventually figured out that energy is conserved, but in hindsight that’s almost a definition of energy. Why do you think we used the label “kinetic energy” for the quantity “1/2 m v^2″ instead of for “1/2 m v^3”? Any property of a system that doesn’t have such constraints isn’t interesting enough to be noteworthy. The whole reason we track “energy” is because it’s a limited resource which can be used to do things and predict what can be done.
Money is a lot like an “economic energy” in that regardless of whether people are being paid in dollars or pesos or gold, watching flows and quantities of money tells you interesting things about the system. And you can’t just “print more” because that dilutes the economic energy. If you could, people would just print it when needed, and you’d think about it as much as you think about the number of people who have an even number of items in their left pocket.
So maybe this woo energy doesn’t have units of joules, in the same way that “economic energy” doesn’t, but it’s certainly conceivable that there are significantly constrained quantities of other systems which become important due to their constraints. Maybe we’re just at the stage where we’ve noticed that you can put energy into objects by lifting them and get it back out later, but haven’t yet figured out how to define “joule” and the laws that dictate how it flows from gravitational potential to kinetic to thermal and back.
Physicists eventually figured out that energy is conserved, but in hindsight that’s almost a definition of energy. Why do you think we used the label “kinetic energy” for the quantity “1/2 m v^2″ instead of for “1/2 m v^3”? Any property of a system that doesn’t have such constraints isn’t interesting enough to be noteworthy. The whole reason we track “energy” is because it’s a limited resource which can be used to do things and predict what can be done.
Money is a lot like an “economic energy” in that regardless of whether people are being paid in dollars or pesos or gold, watching flows and quantities of money tells you interesting things about the system. And you can’t just “print more” because that dilutes the economic energy. If you could, people would just print it when needed, and you’d think about it as much as you think about the number of people who have an even number of items in their left pocket.
So maybe this woo energy doesn’t have units of joules, in the same way that “economic energy” doesn’t, but it’s certainly conceivable that there are significantly constrained quantities of other systems which become important due to their constraints. Maybe we’re just at the stage where we’ve noticed that you can put energy into objects by lifting them and get it back out later, but haven’t yet figured out how to define “joule” and the laws that dictate how it flows from gravitational potential to kinetic to thermal and back.