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On the Concept of Energy

History of Science for Teaching

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Abstract

These instructions are intended to provide guidance to authors “It is important to realize that in physics today we have no knowledge of what energy is”, said the Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman in his Lectures. “Nobody knows what energy really is”, one reads in Bergmann and Schaefer’s Experimental Physics (1998). We cannot answer the question of what energy really is, explain Dransfeld et al. (2001). Although everybody has a feeling of what energy is, wrote Çengel and Boles (2002), it is difficult to give a precise definition for it. According to Halliday et al. (2003), it is very difficult to give a simple definition of energy. If we cannot explain in a clear way what energy is, the concept of energy must be a problem in science teaching.

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  • Ricardo Lopes Coelho

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  • Faculty of Science, University of Lisbon

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Coelho, R.L. (2011). On the Concept of Energy. In: Kokkotas, P.V., Malamitsa, K.S., Rizaki, A.A. (eds) Adapting Historical Knowledge Production to the Classroom. SensePublishers. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6091-349-5_6

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