Back to Table of Contents To explore this question, we'll
consider the six most basic forms of energy in a little more
detail. These are: In the process, we will hopefully shed a
little more light on how energy is defined, and how these
concepts were discovered by humans. As described in the previous
section on the various forms of energy, kinetic energy is the
energy an object possesses by virtue of its motion. Anything
that is moving or rotating possesses kinetic energy. The faster
an object moves or rotates, the greater its kinetic energy. But
how do we define kinetic energy mathematically, as something we
can quantify? Well, for a simple particle of mass m (say,
measured in kilograms) moving with some particular velocity v
(say, in meters per second), the kinetic energy is defined as
one-half of the particles mass times the square of its velocity
(actually the magnitude of its velocity, its "speed", but we
won't be pedantic here), Ekinetic = (1/2) m v2. To see first how
this formula "behaves", note from t