allopoietic

Energy still remains elusive. I think that the word "quantum," as you said, refers to the scalar nature of energy: that it does not increase or decrease gradually. It jumps up or down by whole quantum increments. My question was aimed at determining if energy is a single item divided or many items associated. According to the Standard Model, in the beginning all energy was in one place—a point smaller than a period. Today all the energy is still in one place; the place is a good deal bigger, and we are inside it. As we observe reality we see manifestations of energy as a gamma ray coming in from a supernova, or a light ray from the sun, or heat from a candle. These photons are of different frequencies, and carry different capacity to make change in the environment, but are they discrete or connected or both discrete and connected? Is all energy connected in a single field like a great tossing sea throughout the universe, or do we actually experience discrete energy stuff? At the international science fair, one scientists described reality as possibly an ancestor simulation run by beings of the post human condition. On the inside of the universe can we tell if ours is a truly objective existence, or if energy is merely data in a very detailed simulation?

We see how fusion in the sun converts a small amount of mass and liberates it as a high energy photon, a gamma ray. The gamma ray may only travel a few mm. before it is absorbed and emitted again in a new direction at a slightly lower frequency. I recall that the random walk of the energy takes about fifteen thousand years to reach the solar surface, and by that time the frequency of the photons being emitted is that of visible light at 5780 K. I think you are saying the phrase "random walk of a gamma ray" is a figure of speech. Energy makes the journey, but not as a particular or individual stuff that we could follow. Perhaps, it is like energy in a water surface wave: you can see the wave traveling toward the shore, but you cannot find a particular something in the wave that causes the moving shape.

The dictionary definition of energy isn't very helpful: "The ability to do work." As you get into what work is and what matter is, the definition becomes circular. It seems to mean something like, "Energy is the ability to make a change in energy." I am not expecting a better answer. I don't think anyone has one, but I still have questions about what we do know. Thermodynamics, rule one: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. My understanding: The universe comes self-contained, and equipped with a large but finite amount of energy that makes everything, and causes all events. My question: How does primal energy divide to fill space? Is there one quanta at the start with an unimaginably high frequency that splits to cause events, or is primal energy composed of, say, 10^75 quantum all packed into the same dimensionless point, and each with some initial maximum frequency at the highest range of Gamma rays? Rule two: The entropy of the universe never decreases. My understanding: a) Energy causes lots of events per space-time interval in the beginning, but as space-time numbers increase the averages of energy events per unit of time and space decrease. Eventually they approach zero. b) As energy moves from vigor to lassitude, it changes direction randomly causing matter and energy to move away from order toward disorder. Everything gets more, and more mixed up as time progresses. My question: Do quantum maintain their individuality? If I could somehow slap a label on a quanta of heat from a fire, and then if I reverse time, could I follow it backwards to the beginning? (In my mind's eye I would see its frequency increase as an elevation in the electromagnetic force of an atom, and then as a photon going back toward the sun, and then as an increasingly intense photon doing its random walk backwards toward some proton in the heart of the sun. By the time it reaches the proton its energy has elevated to gamma ray level and it would enter proton radius to become the lone down quark chasing two up quarks inside.) Are quarks composed of many quantum, or are they one quanta with very, very high frequency?

I think that life and biological evolution starts with the first complete cell roughly around four billion years ago. In my opinion, the energy environment on the surface of the Earth was too vigorous, and the time from the end of the terminal bombardment that formed the Earth too short for minerals to evolve something so complex as the first cell. Therefore the first cell was either an artifact of God or space aliens, or the initial evolution of minerals took place over billions of years in a space environment, perhaps to cold of the Oort cloud, and then the cell was transported to Earth via a comet or asteroid. The energy environment in the human body is so vigorous that each and every cell must do between a thousand and a million repairs to DNA each day. Cells all have systems that actively and vigorously defend the order that the cell has by automatically checking and repairing essential structures. Since minerals have none of that, I think a cold environment and more time would be the only hope that evolution can happen in minerals. The short answer is that we do not know where or how the first highly advanced systems that made the first cell came from, but once it was on the Earth, the cell pattern was programmed to defend itself, reproduce, and evolve in the energy environment of Earth.