The word energy derives from Greekἐνέργεια, which appears for the first time in the 4th century BCE works of Aristotle . The modern concept of energy emerged from the idea of vis viva, which Leibniz defined as the product of the mass of an object and its velocity squared; he believed that total vis viva was conserved. To account for slowing due to friction, Leibniz claimed that heat consisted of the random motion of the constituent parts of matter — a view described by Bacon in Novum Organon to illustrate Inductive reasoning and shared by Isaac Newton, although it would be more than a century until this was generally accepted. Émilie marquise du Châtelet in her book Institutions de Physique, published in 1740, incorporated the idea of Leibniz with practical observations of Gravesande to show that the "quantity of motion" of a moving object is proportional to its mass and its velocity squared. In 1802 lectures to the Royal Society, Thomas Young was the first to use the term "energy" in its modern sense, instead of vis viva. In the 1807 publication of those lectures, he wrote, Gustave-Gaspard Coriolis described "kinetic energy" in 1829 in its modern sense, and in 1853, William Rankine coined the term "potential energy." It was argued for some years whether energy was a substance or merely a physical quantity.
Thermodynamics
The development of steam engines required engineers to develop concepts and formulas that would allow them to describe the mechanical and thermal efficiencies of their systems. Engineers such as Sadi Carnot, physicists such as James Prescott Joule, mathematicians such as Émile Clapeyron and Hermann von Helmholtz, and amateurs such as Julius Robert von Mayer all contributed to the notion that the ability to perform certain tasks, called work, was somehow related to the amount of energy in the system. In the 1850s, Glasgow professor of natural philosophyWilliam Thomson and his ally in the engineering science William Rankine began to replace the older language of mechanics with terms such as "actual energy", "kinetic energy", and "potential energy". William Thomson amalgamated all of these laws into the laws of thermodynamics, which aided in the rapid development of explanations of chemical processes using the concept of energy by Rudolf Clausius, Josiah Willard Gibbs and Walther Nernst. It also led to a mathematical formulation of the concept of entropy by Clausius, and to the introduction of laws of radiant energy by Jožef Stefan. Rankine, coined the term "potential energy". In 1881, William Thomson stated before an audience that: Over the following thirty years or so this newly developing science went by various names, such as the dynamical theory of heat or energetics, but after the 1920s generally came to be known as thermodynamics, the science of energy transformations. Stemming from the 1850s development of the first two laws of thermodynamics, the science of energy have since branched off into a number of various fields, such as biological thermodynamics and thermoeconomics, to name a couple; as well as related terms such as entropy, a measure of the loss of useful energy, or power, an energy flow per unit time, etc. In the past two centuries, the use of the word energy in various "non-scientific" vocations, e.g. social studies, spirituality and psychology has proliferated the popular literature.
