Work and Energy

Energy is a very important concept that is heavily used in everyday life. Everything around us, including ourselves, needs energy to function. For example, electricity provides home appliances with the energy they require, food gives us energy to survive, and the sun provides earth with the energy needed for the existence of life! Experiments show that energy is a scalar quantity related to the state of an object. Energy may exist in various forms: mechanical, chemical, gravitational, electromagnetic, nuclear, and thermal. Furthermore, energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be transformed from one form to another. In other words, if energy were to be exchanged between objects inside a system, then the total amount of energy (the sum of all forms of energy) in the system will remain constant.