Vernon Ehlers: “I believe that energy is one of the most misunderstood topics in this Nation, and I believe that is largely because…”

“I believe that energy is one of the most misunderstood topics in this Nation, and I believe that is largely because energy is so hard to describe and define. Most of us do not know what it is. We cannot see it, we cannot feel it, we cannot touch it, we cannot weigh it. When you were a little kid, your mother never sent you to the store for a bottle of energy. You cannot buy energy that way. Yet, somehow we know what it is, because we talk about it when we get up in the morning, saying 'Oh, we do not have much energy;' or, 'Oh, we really have a lot of energy today;' we are raring to go. And that is a pretty good perception of what energy actually is. I happen to be a physicist, and energy in physics is defined as the ability to do work. So that fits our everyday conception of energy, the ability to do work. Now, in today's society, we depend a lot on energy to do our work. We use energy constantly in transportation, in the workplace, in so many different ways, and it is extremely important.”