What is energy?
Energy is the rate at which a region's records are worked through by repair, counted on that region's own clock. The world has one move. Two neighbors share a seam, their readings disagree, and repair brings both to the midpoint. How fast a region is being worked through is its energy, and in physics language it is what generates the region's advance in time, the way momentum generates sliding. The familiar properties follow from the move. Disagreement is a sum of squares with a floor at zero, so energy is never negative. Regions with no seam between them have nothing to repair across, so their energies add. Each repair takes from one reading exactly what it gives the other, like double-entry bookkeeping, so energy is conserved, and a perpetual motion machine asks for a move that does not exist.
This answer comes from OPH, Observer Patch Holography. OPH is a rigorous, consistent and complete description of the unified, self-creating computational Universe we inhabit. Its consistency is machine-checked: the fixed point at its core is constructed explicitly, and a theory with a model contains no contradiction.
To understand OPH and check every step yourself, start with the free book Reverse Engineering Reality. It builds the theory from the ground up, and the OPH Notebook answers your questions while you read.
read the free bookask the notebookor ask sage:read chapter 18: Why Does Anything Have Energy?watch a universe make its own particles