Consciousness: You have it. You use it. You know what it does.
But you have no idea what it is.
You can argue that everything is energy, or can be converted into energy under the right circumstances, but this falls far short of explaining the physical world, much less the world of ideas.
But! If something was not made of energy, would you be able to perceive it? What do we sense (whether through our senses or the instruments of scientific experiments)? Just the interplay of energy converting from one form to another, which we call ‘a force’ in normal parlance.
Do you know that matter and energy are interconvertible? Anything with no mass (no energy) is therefore impossible to detect. The history of neutrino observation is an interesting diversion here, as they were originally thought to be massless.
Energy is an exchange of ‘physical something’ but that does not say much (energy is a property of matter (hence Einstein’s famous equation, E=MC^2, showing how they are related). Chemical energy is stored in the bonds between atoms in a molecule and is released when those bonds are broken, such as in an oxidation reaction (combustion). Kinetic energy is the energy inherent in a moving mass relative to a mass at rest. If they collide, they will be converted to another form of energy, typically heat.
Everything is an exchange of physical …something. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, only changed. The principle of conservation of energy says that the amount of energy in the universe is constant.
Energy is the capacity for something to do work on something else.
Radio waves (you cannot escape the densely populated webs of flux) are a perturbation of the electromagnetic spectrum produced by systematically varying the amplitude of an alternating current applied to an antenna of some description. They are not much more complex than that; it rather muddies the waters trying to invoke quantum entanglement of atoms etc where they are not required.
An electron is a wave in the sense that the probability distribution of its position in space obeys the Schrödinger equation; a photon is a particle in the sense that it is a quantum of the electromagnetic field, which propagates as a wave. The tennis ball is a wave too, BUT its wavelength is an undetectably infinitesimal fraction of its diameter, so its “fuzziness” has no measurable consequences. The water wave MAY have quanta, but they are too small to detect separately. Sound waves in a crystal do come in quanta called phonons, and they obey the same quantum rules as photons etc. It is all down to size (size does matter size does matter size does matter): small things exhibit wavelike behaviour (motion ocean etc!) and are noticeably quantised; big things do not and are not.
…my imagination is not a reliable test of plausibility!!! A century and a half ago almost anyone (including Maxwell) would have said that you cannot have a wave without something to wiggle, so there must be some “stuff” (luminiferous aether) in which electromagnetic waves propagate. Common sense, right? Oops. Still, one feels certain that the spacetime through which waves propagate must exist “before” [not in the sense of a time sequence, but in the sense of a necessary condition] waves can propagate through it (shrug).
