Energy Transformation and Flow

Abstract

Energy is the driving force behind everything we know and experience. To ensure its availability we seek out energy sources of every type real and imaginable. Its presence in every aspect of our lives gives us the illusion that we understand what it is. Yet every branch of science has a different description of energy that is suitable in its own area of expertise, but is not applicable in general. It may come as a surprise then that energy has properties of its own, verifiable by experiment, that are universal and extend throughout all of Nature from the tiniest particles to the heavenly bodies and life itself. When we explore the universal properties of energy we will find that they are embodied most intensely in the phenomenon of life. We conclude in these pages that any scientific theory that claims to be complete must include life.