We conclude that energy isn’t created or destroyed because we see it take other forms. For example, when road friction slows down a car, its tires become hot and radiate heat, so kinetic energy is seen to become heat energy, just as 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? If it then floats off into space forever, what stores that energy? Or if it crashes into 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, assumes an unknown mechanism that invisibly stores and releases energy as needed.
In this model, energy is the rate of transfer of processing by the quantum network. Light then has radiant energy because it is a process spreading, and high frequencies that spread at a faster rate have more energy. Radiant energy is conserved because photons always restart, as processing can.
This approach can also explain kinetic energy. When light shining on a solar sail makes it move, radiant energy is converted into kinetic energy. If the sail moves by acquiring photons that bias its distribution, kinetic energy is also based on photons. When objects collide, kinetic energy is conserved because the photons exchanged are constant, and nuclear energy is also based on photons if matter is condensed light. Physical events then restart photons in various forms, as light or matter, but photons are conserved because they are immortal.
What then is potential energy? Potential energy is based on gravity, which Einstein concluded isn’t a force at all, so no energy is involved. Potential energy isn’t a form of energy but a way to allow energy to be conserved when actually, it isn’t.
Current physics has many conservation laws, of matter, charge, momentum, isospin, and quark flavor, but each is partial, as nuclear reactions don’t conserve matter, and weak interactions don’t conserve quark flavor. The conservation of energy is now also a partial law because the expansion of space doesn’t conserve it, and it needs an invented (potential) energy to work. However the conservation of photons still works, as when a rocket leaves earth, no photons are lost, and when it crashes on Jupiter, no photons are created.
Note that the expansion of space doesn’t affect the conservation of photons. When our universe began as a little rip in the quantum fabric (2.4.2), it created space and light by what physics calls inflation, until the expansion of space healed it. Since then, the number of photons that exist hasn’t changed because they never die, and space expanding doesn’t change that. Our universe conserves the light it came from but not energy, because it is still expanding. The first law of thermodynamics then isn’t universal, so is the second law the same?