ENERGY EXPLAINED

It's one of the most basic concepts in physics, governing the behaviour of everything from subatomic particles to galaxies

- WORD ANDREW MAY

Energy is a word that crops up all of the time in countless contexts. Sometimes we think of it as a kind of resource or commodity, like water or light, but it isn’t really a physical ‘thing’ like that at all. To a scientist, energy is an abstract property that’s possessed by actual ‘things’ - water, light, human beings, spaceships, stars and anything else you care to think of. As such, it’s one of the most important concepts in physics, and can help us understand how the universe works.