Cognitive Resources for Understanding Energy

The papers "Cognitive Resources for Understanding Energy" and "Making Work Work"  (that you can find on the net) by Gregg Swackhamer,  helped me a lot in my understanding of Energy. Swackhamer describes the "mysterious school science energy concept" in contrast to the scientific energy concept, explaining that is important to understand that energy does not come in different forms and that the distinctive names of Energy arise because of the different systems in which Energy is stored, not because there are different forms of energy (you can find an analogous approach in the Karlsruhe Physics Course, described in a previous blog, "The Karlsruhe Physics Course" 28 july 2017). I also found very usefull his explanation of the so colled Potential Energy (just as real as Energy stored in any other way) in connection with the introduction of the concept of field that is the physical system wich Energy we call "potential" is  stored in. It is very interesting the idea that "thinking that forms of energy really do exist sometimes induces people erroneously to think of energy itself as a physical system. This leads to the claim that light is pure energy rather than just a property of some proper physical system such as a photon or an electromagnetic wave". You can find the misleading term "pure energy" in famous popular books. I think is particularly enlightening the comparison between Energy and Information: looking at your computer you don't think that, for example, hard disk information is transformed into wire information and then into RAM information and then into CD information, and so on. Information is Information wherever it is stored; the same is for Energy.