Andy smith
Growing up in the US during the oil embargo of the early 1970s, I was bombarded by public service announcements encouraging people to conserve energy. But at a very young age, I also read that “energy is always conserved”, according to physics. This baffled me. If nature automatically conserves energy, why would human efforts to do so be needed?
I soon realised that physicists don’t exactly speak English. They employ a dialect full of familiar-sounding terms with unfamiliar meanings (including “conserve” and “energy”). Worse still, many words, including simple ones like “force” and “mass”, don’t even signify what physicists originally intended. Consequently, the language we use…
