Since you include "extensions", I'm not sure I completely agree. In my career, my "extensions" have included everything from SEMs (Scanning Electron Microscopes) to surveying instruments and astronomical telescopes.
One can certainly measure (sense) gravity and elevation and density and mass (as well as temperature).
I used to do R&D on solid state sensors, so I know that one can measure electrical potentials that are a function of the pressure at the bottom of a water column in a gravitational field.
Perhaps you are correct. With our human senses, we may not be able to sense energy directly. (We sense IR as a change in skin temperature when it is absorbed, for example).
But, with our extended senses, we can certainly sense all the components required to calculate potential energy.
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Let me look at it from a different direction: when I was on the upper slopes of Fujiyama, I was acutely conscious of the energy I was adding to the potential energy of my backpack's contents -- every step of the way up! '-)
But, when I set the pack down at the edge of the crater, I couldn't sense its (or my) increased potential energy. But, boy, as we "skated" down that loose cinder slope on our descent -- what a spectacular demonstration of the conversion of potential to kinetic energy that was!
Perhaps you're right: we can calculate potential energy from components we can sense (with our extended senses) -- and we can sense the conversion to/from kinetic energy -- but, maybe we can't sense potential energy directly...
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(Pardon the ramble -- I used your question as an excuse to "wind down my mental potential energy" before retiring... LOL!!) Thanks for the excuse to do so!
G'night...
Consider the example of picking up a rock from Earth, taking it in a spacecraft to a planet much more massive than Earth, outside the Solar System, and then dropping it near where this particular planet can begin to attract this rock towards itself. Certainly there will be a change in potential energy that will manifest itself in other forms of energy due to the interaction. Now, could you have calculated how much potential energy that rock on Earth possessed, prior to it being released in the other, massive planet?
D-fendr, I will reply to your reply to my comment regarding randomness, tomorrow because there's room for elaboration and clarification.
Thanks very much for your reply and rambling with me on potential energy. It’s a particular curiosity for me and I appreciate the company.
“detect with the senses or their extensions” is a term of art in a way. As in “Science only deals with those aspects of reality that can be detected with the senses or their extensions.” This is it’s self-chosen limit in order to maintain its place as the seeker of the area of the most solid knowledge. And, yes, it includes microscopes, telescopes, IR, RF and otherwise, etc. etc. All of these eventually result in something we can detect/read with our senses and extend them in some way.
When we determine somethings attributes, we use some scientific measurement to say it emits radiation, has a reflectance of, a mass of, a hardness of, etc. etc.
My curiosity here was what is the instrument to measure potential energy?
I understand “conscious of the energy I was adding to the potential energy of my backpack” but what if I took a blindfolded, fully equipped scientist somewhere and handed him our example of a snow sample and asked -
“determine its potential energy?”
Perhaps the gravitometer is the key? Or James C. Bennett’s dropping experiment? Would the difference between potential energy of snow on the peak and snow in the valley be detectable in this manner?