You don't ask much, do you?

First, physics does not tell us what energy is, in the sense that it might tell us what matter is. (Oh, all right! It's a bit vague about matter as well.... That used to be fairly simple, what with leptons and hadrons, but if I permitted myself to be confused by dark matter for example, that might be some spectacular confusion!)

But really, what energy comes down to amounts to a mathematical statement. It merely is a measure of the amount of work that we can get out of a given source of force. Since work is the product of force and the distance over which it is exerted, that is a matter of simple arithmetic. Certainly energy manifests itself in what we see as a various forms, including kinetic, potential, heat and so on, and we might be tempted to say that all those things are different, and that energy is just an accounting catchall. Well, perhaps, but all those forms are so variously interchangeable that they lend the study of thermodynamics and relativity a great allure.

What they don't do, is to supply a clear mental image of a lump of energy in much the same way that we might have envisaged a lump of butter or iridium. Sorry about that!

Beware the E = mcc thing. It is not a definition; it is a statement of magnitude. It tells you how much energy you can get in principle if you convert mass into energy. It does not for example say whether you get heat or kinetic or potential energy, or in which proportions.

Conversely you could convert your energy into mass. However we run into all sorts of conservation laws that interfere when we try to do it in practice. For example spin, charge, baryon number and lepton number must be conserved. If you start with say, pure light and you convert it into physical matter, you will wind up with equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Very upsetting if you are not careful! Converely, when you convert your matter into energy, you also wind up with enough of a residue to keep your lepton, hadron and charge numbers unchanged.

Explain much of reality you say?

Well yes, in a way, or perhaps many ways. Or perhaps not. All the really fundamental understandings of such matters so far amount to statements in mathematical terms. As soon as you try to explain these things in terms that make sense in everyday concepts, you find yourself handwaving and explaining why it doesn't really work that way, until you revert to the appropriate maths. Try explaining electron or photon spin for example, in terms of cricket balls. Tricky! I would not mind if it didn't work, but it both seems to and seems not to.

I don't know your background, for example whether you are at school or retired, so I don't know whether to recommend that you work at this question or not. Instead I shall leave the decision to you. If you are young, then find a physics textbook, preferably a fairly modern one, but not a "physics for dummies" colouring-in book. Now here comes the dirty trick: work through the book!

Having done that you will be ready to do something that should bring you a bit closer to what you have described as what you have in mind: try reading Roger Penrose's "The Road to Reality".It is designed to be understood by anyone with only a basic understanding of physics. But if you try to skim the book, you are wasting your time.

That is the closest that I can come to recommending  doing something that you can do yourself and that can really work. However it does really mean real work. But just as there is no royal road to mathematics, there is no royal road to real physics. It is simply a matter of: "buckle down or do without". Suit yourself.

We are willing to do all sorts of nice things for you in this blog, but understanding physics for you is more than anyone can do, even Roger Penrose.

Let's drop it there for now. Maybe someone else can put it more clearly. Let us know anyway to what extent our explanations have made matters better or worse as far as your insights are concerned. One might remark that it is peculiar how few people bother to think about such things.

Or not so peculiar.

Good luck,

Jon

[Every time I find an interesting question, Jon Richfield gets in there first!]

This question is about unification. If "everything" is energy, you might replace "energy" by a word like "stuff" or "ninkle" without making any difference to the sense.

As an analogy, take myself. I am a person, a plumber, a pedant, a programmer, a parent, a son, a husband, a driver, a drunkard, a dreamer, a debtor. Those are all facets of the unified Me, but you won't see many of those if I am just waiting for a bus. In the same way, dozens of apparently distinct physical phenomena have been unified over the centuries by deeper understanding of their relationships.

Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton unified the Earth and the biblical Heavens, which were previously thought to be perfect and unchanging. James Clerk Maxwell unified magnetism and electricity. Rutherford and Thompson unified 92 known chemical elements into just protons, neutrons and electrons. Gell-Mann and Zweig unified dozens of "elementary" particles into six Quarks. Friedrich Wöhler unified inorganic and organic chemistry (by synthesising Urea).

Einstein merely unified matter and energy. Before him, energy pushed matter: mass was tangible and occupied a point in space, energy was a kind of tension in space. No serious scientist questioned this duality. Now, energy is more like porridge with lumps in it. So it goes.

Incidentally, I was astonished when I found out that sombody had (comparatively) recently discovered plate tectonics, because I understood the entire concept in 1956 when I was about seven years old. If you had seen my mother boiling porridge, you would have grasped plate tectonics, too, as well as E=em.see.squared.

String theorists claim to unify all forces and particles into one mathematical "group" theory in 11 dimensions, and then pick and choose which "results" relate to which physical phenomena. Personally, I believe they have failed to understand the gravity of the situation.

I like to think of energy as a distortion in spacetime - imagine slaping you hand in water, you create a wavefront which is energy. The medium is water (analagous to space) the wave is energy (analagous to a photon of light).