Science deduced that energy isn’t created or destroyed because it was seen to take other forms. For example, when road friction slows down a car, its tires become hot and radiate heat, so kinetic energy becomes heat energy, and steam engines convert heat energy into kinetic energy. Energy is then observed to take different forms, but with one notable exception.
Lifting an object takes energy that dropping it releases, but where does it go to or come from? There is no heat flow, so it is said to have potential energy based on its position in a gravitational field. This balances the energy books to conserve energy, but where is potential energy stored?
For example, if a rocket blasts off into an earth orbit, where did the liftoff energy go? And if it floats off into space forever, where did that energy go? Or if it crashes on Jupiter, to release more energy than it took to leave earth, where did the extra energy come from? The current answer, that gravity gives and takes potential energy, lets energy be conserved when actually, it isn’t.
In this model, energy is the rate at which processing is transferred, so light has radiant energy because it transfers processing, and high frequencies that do that at a faster rate have more energy. Radiant energy is conserved because photons always restart, as processing can.
But what about kinetic energy? When light shining on a solar sail makes it move, radiant energy is converted into kinetic energy. The sail absorbs photons that bias its distribution, so it moves their way. Kinetic energy then is also based on photons, and it is conserved when objects collide because the photons exchanged are constant. And nuclear energy is also based on photons if matter is condensed light. Physical events restart photons in various forms, as light or matter, but photons are conserved because they can always restart.
However potential energy is different. It is currently attributed gravity, which as Einstein concluded, isn’t a force at all, and so can’t create energy. Potential energy then isn’t a form of energy at all, but a virtual energy that justifies our equations, just as virtual particles are.
Current physics has many conservation laws, of matter, charge, momentum, isospin, and quark flavor, but all are partial, as nuclear reactions don’t conserve matter, and weak interactions don’t conserve flavor. The conservation of energy is also partial, because the expansion of space doesn’t conserve it, and it needs a virtual (potential) energy to work. Yet photons are always conserved, as when a rocket leaves earth, they aren’t lost, and if it crashes on Jupiter, they aren’t created.
When our universe began as a little rip in the quantum fabric (2.4.2), the event that physics calls inflation created space and light, until space expanded to heal the rip. Since then, the number of photons that exist hasn’t changed because light is immortal, and space expanding doesn’t change that. Our universe conserves light not energy, so the first law of thermodynamics isn’t universal but the conservation of light is. Is the second law then also limited rather than universal?