I have cultivated a linguistic quirk. Like all known quirks, it wasn't intentional. It evolved out of a comfort habit where I self-soothe by listening to lectures on quantum mechanics. Just like some linguistic quirks are present from early age, depending on one's family culture, geography, or just an eccentric 4th grade teacher whose pronunciation permanently takes up residence in your head.
Other linquistic quirks are cultivated slowly, like when you live in another country and your reaction to an event occurs in the host language. That sound is like a song that you remember and sing whenever you need to say "give me a minute" and instead "un instant, svp" comes out. You don't have to be fluent in French to have French-like reactions. On a totally unrelated topic, The Story of French is an absolute page-turner of a book. Mine is marked up and annotated from cover to cover. Totally worth the read.
Now, back to that linguistic quirk. My go-to word is energie.
I use the word "energie" as an ontological noun, whereas physics uses "energy" as a quantitative property.
In standard physics, energy is not usually treated as a thing in the same sense that an electron, photon, field, or excitation is a thing. Energy is a conserved quantity associated with the state of a physical system. I have a sense for this concept professionally, when our engineers design Waste-to-Energy (WtE) facilities. Basically, they analyze and categorize a mountain of rubbish similar to how a power company views coal or natural gas. Essentially, as a fuel source. Once you account for the energy that goes in (the trash), conversion (turning fire into steam), and for the turbine (turning steam into electricity) you get a standard mass-burn facility that converts about one-forth of the trash's raw energy into usable electricity. To put this in practical terms, a typical modern facility can safely transform 1 tone of everyday city rubbage into roughly 500-700 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity. That's enough to power an average home for about 2-3 weeks.
So, clearly when I talk about using the word "energie" as a linguistic quirk, I'm not talking about the way I use the word "energy" at work. There, I talk about energy in terms of lifecycle, footprints, and sustainability. Depending on the application, we're talking energy density, decay heat, and half-life.
Using the word energie turns into a linguistic quirk because in my subconscious mind somewhere there is a tendency to reach for superclasses to understand the universe. Things like particles, field excitations, a quantum, a vibrational mode or a frequency or string vibration. Basically whatever physically instantiated dynamical entity is propagating, oscillating, interacting, or otherwise changing states.
That's why the word "energy" feels ordinary or inadequate for what I'm wishing to convey. I'm not just talking about joules, I'm talking about the physical carrier or manifestation of activity. That's the stuff that grabs me and accounts for such a disporportionate amount of books I have on physcis vs philosophy, my actual major.
I think there's a historical reason that this linguistic temptation is so strong. Classical physics encourages us to picture matter and energy as totally different categories: particles have mass, waves transmit energy, objects possess kinetic and potential energy. Okay, easy peasy. We read that book in elementary school. But then we get to quantum field theory which totally destabilizes that intuitive taxonomy. At first there was nothing, and then nothing exploded. POW!
Our minds are blown. A particle is now understood as an excitation in a field, while a photon is an excitation of the electromagnetic field. Now consider that electrons are excitations of the electron field. This means their identities are associated with quantum numbers, interactions, mass, spin, momentum, and energy. What colloquially looks like "little pieces of matter" is already much closer to a patterned field behavior.
Even though a lot of physicts reject string theory, it's an interesting theory of gravity (if nothing more) for the purpose of this post. So let's step into that theory, which I gotta admit, would be compelling if we could physically test it. Since we don't have an accelerator the size of our galaxy, I don't foresee that happening anytime soon. Anyhow, the theory itself in the usual heuristic description, is what distinguishes one particle species from another. It's called the vibrational state of the underlying string. So calling the underlying phenomenon a "particle" sounds a bit downstream from the phenomenon that I'm actually thinking about.
Since hierarchies help us organize objects, including packets of thought or meta-thinking, my mental hierarchy looks roughly like this:
ordinary language
matter ↔ energy
standard physics language
fields → excitations/particles → states possessing energy and momentum
my intuitive language
underlying physical activity → energie → particular manifestations such as particle, vibration, excitation, radiation, etc.
That's why using the word "energie" would hurt the ears of a physicist and yet be perfectly intelligible once they push past that bias and we chat about the topic. The error I'm making is terminological vs conceptual. If I said, "An electron is energy," a physicist would object or reframe that statement because energy is a property represented by the Hamiltonian/state relationship, not the ontological twin identity of the electron. But if I explained, "I use energie informally to mean a physically instantiated excitation or dynamical configuration, without commiting to whether its is a particle, a wave, a field excitation, vibration, or some other force, they would know exactly what distincting I was trying to preserve and state an example using the correct physics terminology. That's when you know they know their stuff.
Admittedly, particle itself is a dangerous word for building intuition across theories. Classical particles are localized objects with trajectories. But quantum "particles" don't behave that way. QFT makes fields fundamental in the conventional forumuation. String theory, if ever proven correct, supplies another underlying ontology. So when my mind travels rapidly across classical mechanics, QM, QFT, and string theory, just for fun, I grab onto words that don't force me to change ontological vocabulary every thiry seconds. Working in complex industries is already a massive cognitive race on a daily basis, when I'm relaxing, I just want to be entertained and let my mind and imagination wander.
So, while the word "energie" does not fit all configurations in which I utilize the term, it is an invented (i.e., quirky) placeholder for the physically active substrate or excitation before you decide which theoretical description to impose on it. It totally fails as a technical term, but when you're tired of speaking technically and want a short-hand or private conceptual tool, its function is surprisingly coherent.
Energie = not simply a form of energy. That collapses it back into the standard concept I'm trying to escape.
energie = a provisional name for a physical excitation, oscillation, or dynamical entity capable of carrying energy and information.
That's surprisingly close to what I am trying to say when I use the word.
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