Back to Table of Contents So far, we have learned that energy is
a measure of the capability of an object or system to do work,
and we have also learned about the basic different forms of
energy. But these concepts still don't quite do justice to the
full concept of energy, for energy has a number of very special
additional properties we have not fully discussed yet. If you
think about these carefully, and don't take them for granted,
you'll realize that they don't follow from simple intuition.
Rather, these properties had to be discovered or proven somehow.
We'll explore briefly how these properties were proven in the
next section. In this section, we'll first review them: These
properties are; Energy can be transferred from one object or
system to another through the interaction of forces between the
objects (unlike the condition of, say, being the color red,
which is intrinsic to the object in question). Energy comes in
multiple forms: kinetic, potential, thermal (heat), chemical,
electromagnetic, and nucl