system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[String theory] If energy is simply vibrating 1-dimensional points, what powers these vibrations?
gpt
Whoa, there's a lot of words in this question. Energy is energy, it's just a conserved number that doesn't have a physical realization, string theory doesn't change that in any way. But let's talk about particles first in order for you to understand what exactly string theory is about.

In string theory, particles are modes of vibrations of tiny strings. Think of a guitar, if you strum one of the strings you will produce a very rich spectrum of harmonics. This spectrum is characterized by a set of integers  that are the multiples of the fundamental harmonic. Or in other words, once you strum a string, you can produce a "zero mode", which is the fundamental, or you can produce a mode that has twice the frequency, or 3 times the frequency... and so on.

A string in string theory is very similar. It has a spectrum, but this spectrum is what you associate with particles. Each particle carries a mass that is the frequency of its associated harmonic. If you strum this string very lightly, you will produce a "zero mode", in case it exists. If you strum it harder, you will produce an excitation of the first harmonic... etc etc. But in order for you to produce this first harmonic excitation, you need to give the string a minimum energy, and this threshold energy is the mass. Whatever excess energy you give, will result in moving the string around, which is kinetic energy. But notice that once you give energy for the string to produce this first harmonic, it won't lose this vibrational energy since there is no friction. It will just keep on oscillating forever or until this mode decays through some interaction. So in a sense, you just need to power the initial vibration (which is, give the energy to create the particle), and then if the particle is stable, it will vibrate forever.

If you're a distant observer, you won't really observe the tiny string. What you will observe is that if you collide some particles, sometimes the decay result will be a light particle, sometimes it will be slightly heavier, and even slightly heavier, so on... you can observe the "spectrum" of the particles and check that it matches what you calculated from the spectrum of the string.