Orac asks "Is energy real?". I think he is the one that has a better grasp of that than I do. But I'm not sure how it couldn't be real. Unless of course we go to a Descartian universe where it is all in our minds. Descartes is the one that came up with the phrase "I think, therefore I am". He reached this conclusion after a lot of thought about what he could absolutely know to be true. He realized that people have dreams and hallucinations that are not real, but they seem real, so we can't actually know that what we see as the world around us is real, it may be a dream or hallucination. But he knows that he is real, because he is thinking. So in a Descartian universe there might not be any energy since it is all in our mind. That of course pushes the question back a step. If all we perceive around us is a product of our mind, where does our mind exist?
Then he has the link to the article about a zero-energy universe. Essentially that says that the total sum of the energy in the universe is zero. That doesn't say there is no energy. There is positive energy, mass, and negative energy, gravity. But that leaves the fact of energy alive and well, it is just that at the end of the day the books have to balance.
Bill Gill
