system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
I'm having trouble grasping the concept of energy.

I understand all the equations that I have been given and see how they all relate, but I can't help but feel that it doesn't exist. Energy to me feels like a common variable that is used to relate other variables together. Can somebody help me materialize what energy is? I think if I have a mental image of what energy is or looks like I will be able to understand it better.
gpt
In general, conserved quantities result from a symmetry in the problem. For example, angular momentum conservations comes from rotational symmetry (like how a sphere looks the same from all directions). Conservation of energy comes from time ~~inversion~~ *translation* symmetry. That is, if you replaced time with ~~(-time)~~ *(time + deltatime)*, the equations that govern the evolution of the system will still act the same. In a sense, it is just a construct that humans made up, some combination of variables. But it is a combination of variables that is conserved because of time symmetry that is inherent in the processes involved in the problem.