Interestingly, even many founders of modern science held some dubious notions concerning energy. To Galileo Galilei, heat was an illusion of senses, an outcome of mental alchemies; Francis Bacon thought that heat could not generate motion or motion, heat.
But neither the absence of any unified understanding of the phenomenon nor the prevalence of erroneous interpretations of various energy conversions prevented a great deal of empirical progress in harnessing diverse energies and in gradually improving efficiencies of some of their conversions. Seen from a biophysical point of view, all human activities are nothing but a series of energy conversions, and so it is inevitable that different energy sources and changing conversion techniques have imposed obvious limits on the scope of our action—or opened up new possibilities for human development.
Prehistoric and Ancient Cultures
From the perspective of general energetics, the long span of human prehistoric development can be seen as the quest for a more efficient use of somatic energy, the muscular exertions used primarily to secure a basic food supply and then to gradually improve shelters, acquire more material possessions, and evolve a variety of cultural expressions.
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