How new forms of energy are discovered

Textbooks often give the impression that a sophisticated physics concept was created by one person who had an inspiration one day, but in reality it is more in the nature of science to rough out an idea and then gradually refine it over many years. The idea of energy was tinkered with from the early 1800's on, and new types of energy kept getting added to the list.

To establish the existence of a new form of energy, a physicist has to

(1) show that it could be converted to and from other forms of energy; and

(2) show that it related to some definite measurable property of the object, for example its temperature, motion, position relative to another object, or being in a solid or liquid state.

For example, energy is released when a piece of iron is soaked in water, so apparently there is some form of energy already stored in the iron. The release of this energy can also be related to a definite measurable property of the chunk of metal: it turns reddish-orange. There has been a chemical change in its physical state, which we call rusting.

Although the list of types of energy kept getting longer and longer, it was clear that many of the types were just variations on a theme. There is an obvious similarity between the energy needed to melt ice and to melt butter, or between the rusting of iron and many other chemical reactions. The topic of the next chapter is how this process of simplification reduced all the types of energy to a very small number (four, according to the way I've chosen to count them).

It might seem that if the principle of conservation of energy ever appeared to be violated, we could fix it up simply by inventing some new type of energy to compensate for the discrepancy. This would be like balancing your checkbook by adding in an imaginary deposit or withdrawal to make your figures agree with the bank's statements. Step (2) above guards against this kind of chicanery. In the 1920s there were experiments that suggested energy was not conserved in radioactive processes. Precise measurements of the energy released in the radioactive decay of a given type of atom showed inconsistent results. One atom might decay and release, say, 1.1 × 10-10 J of energy, which had presumably been stored in some mysterious form in the nucleus. But in a later measurement, an atom of exactly the same type might release 1.2 × 10-10 J. Atoms of the same type are supposed to be identical, so both atoms were thought to have started out with the same energy. If the amount released was random, then apparently the total amount of energy was not the same after the decay as before, i.e., energy was not conserved.

Only later was it found that a previously unknown particle, which is very hard to detect, was being spewed out in the decay. The particle, now called a neutrino, was carrying off some energy, and if this previously unsuspected form of energy was added in, energy was found to be conserved after all. The discovery of the energy discrepancies is seen with hindsight as being step (1) in the establishment of a new form of energy, and the discovery of the neutrino was step (2). But during the decade or so between step (1) and step (2) (the accumulation of evidence was gradual), physicists had the admirable honesty to admit that the cherished principle of conservation of energy might have to be discarded.

Self-Check

How would you carry out the two steps given above in order to establish that some form of energy was stored in a stretched or compressed spring?

Answer, p. 158