The purpose of a ‘Unified Field Theory’ is to unify all the ‘forces’ in the universe into one single ‘energy field’. We would then have just one single field, instead of four fields. The gravitational field, the electromagnetic field, and the strong and the weak nuclear forces would all be just one single field and the only reason why we would even think of these four as being ‘four different fields’ was because we were ignorant at the time and therefore did not have a ‘Unified Field Theory’ and so therefore could not understand how four such seemingly different ‘forces’ could all just be one unified force and all part of one single unified field of ‘energy’.

Now just what is ‘energy’. This ‘energy’ is a something and not a nothing, and being a something it must possess ‘properties’. You don’t get something out of nothing, which then explains why when you want to make toast you must make sure that the toaster is plugged into the wall before you push down on the button on the toaster. If you forget that the toaster was unplugged and then come back in a minute or two instead of toast you will have another minute or two wait after you plug the outlet into the wall and then finally the toasting process will start. Yes, energy is definitely a very real something and being a something it must possess properties.

We cannot look at ‘energy’ under a microscope, however we can make observations of the behavior of energy and then based upon the body of evidence gained from various measurements and observations of this ‘energy’ we can begin to assign properties to this energy. The properties we assign would be analogies to perhaps something we could relate to, thus helping us to work with energy, even when we might still not know exactly precisely what an abstract sounding concept such as ‘energy’ might mean.

One of the fundamental properties of energy is described by the ‘inverse square law’ which describes a behavior of energy, and is then found in systems throughout the universe.

Let us suppose you had a quantity of energy and that the quantized energy was ‘one gallon’. Energy is not quantized in gallons, but typically in joules or electron volts, but most people are familiar with gallons or liters and since this is an abstract discussion we will use the term ‘gallons’. Now let us suppose that you set up a big screen at a distance of ‘1’ from a light source. That could be ‘one foot’ or ‘one meter’ or ‘one inch’. It doesn’t matter, just as long as it is 1, just to make the math easier. Let us suppose the light was square shaped to make the concept even easier to understand. You turned on the light and pointed it straight at the big screen and you saw a square of light one foot high and one foot wide. Yes, it was a one foot square of light, or one square meter of light, just depending on which unit of measurement you decided to use.

Now let us suppose that you doubled the distance from the light to the screen to two feet or two meters (any system of measurement as long as the distance was ‘two’). Now according to the ‘Inverse Square Law’ the behavior of energy will be such that every time you double the distance and then take a measurement, the way that the one gallon of light will be spread out will be described by the ‘inverse square’ of that distance. Now the square of a number is that number multiplied by itself, and so the square of 2, the new distance is two multiplied by two which is four. Now an ‘inverse square’ is a square flipped over and changed into a fraction and four, the square of two, when it is flipped over becomes one quarter. So the distance doubled and then you used the inverse square law on the number two and you got 2 squared, which means 2 times 2 equals 4, and then you inversed that squaring result, 4, and got ¼. The gallon of energy will now be divided by one quarter of its previous strength.

Figure 1. A demonstration of the Inverse Square Law. On the left a light has created a one meter square of bright illumination. On the right the screen was moved back twice the distance, and the light spread out to four square meters. The lighter color of the four squares is intended to illustrate the point that the fixed quantity of energy in the light is now four times less intense having been spread out over the four squares, and thus the yellow color is lighter to illustrate the point.

In the image above you can see that when you take that ‘one gallon’ of quantized energy and then spread it out according to the inverse square law, you get the same amount of energy but it is spread out over a larger surface area. In the first image when its distance was one all the energy was in one single square with a measure of one and then when you look on the right you can see that one quarter of the energy can now be found on a square with a measurement of one. Now let’s suppose that you doubled the distance one more time to ‘4 feet’ or ‘4 meters’. 4 squared (4 times 4) is 16 and inverted that becomes one sixteenth (1/16), and so I would need to draw sixteen squares, then color them an even paler yellow, to illustrate the point that now there was even less of that one gallon of energy on a square with a measure of one (1/16). However I will leave you to imagine sixteen squares and then color each one a much paler yellow in your imagination, and then you can think about how much paler that square would get when you went to the next doubled distance (8) and then squared that to get 64 and then inversed that to get 1/64, and then after drawing 64 squares and coloring one of them a really pale yellow, you, in your imagination of course, would begin to understand just how quickly energy spreads out and thins.

When it spreads it remains quantized (it is still that same ‘one gallon’ of energy per micro second coming out of that light) and then if you were to ‘sub-quantize’ that energy at a given point how much you would find on that sub-space would depend on how far away that subspace was from the source. Energy spreads out infinitely, and so it is not surprising that energy in the form of ‘light’ would be coming from some star a bazillion miles away and be seen here in some micro fractional amount of its original quantity (perhaps the light here on earth falling on a one square foot surface would be the fraction one bazillionth…yes, after spreading out by following the inverse square law that original one gallon was spread out so much that a one foot square panel on earth would only be lit up by one bazillionth of a gallon, which then explains why you can only see just a few stars unless you use a telescope which can capture that one gazillionth of a gallon of light even farther away from star that you can see with your eyes).

All energy, such as light, follows this inverse square law. It is for this reason that if you turn on a light to read a book, and then move the light to the far side of the room, you will be squinting as you struggle to read the print, and will be forced to move the light back closer so that you can see what you are doing.

Now we have done our experiment and now we have one observation that we can use to attempt to get to know ‘energy’ better, so that it won’t be such an abstraction but rather will be a little better understood. Now we need to make some sense out of what we just saw so that we can translate our observation into a ‘property’ which we will then assign to energy. Later we can look for more such properties so we can get a fuller picture. But the trip of a thousand miles starts with that first step, so let’s start here.

We can think of the inverse square law as describing a kind of triangular shape. You always see that exact same triangular shape all over the entire universe. You never see the blob shape or the side ways slanted shape, or any other shape. It is always that same triangular shape which is why the Inverse Square Law is referred to as being ‘a Law’ and not a ‘suggestion’ or a ‘possibility’ just depending on what shape energy decided to assume from one moment to the next. No, there is no choice, it is always that triangular shape.

Figure 2. The figure on the left is intended to illustrate how the light from the source spreads out to larger and larger squares forming a triangular shape within which, if you could cut off a slice, you would find a bigger and bigger ‘square’ (here, for the sake of simplicity we are assuming a square light source). The triangular figure on the right shows the triangular shape assumed by an energy wave form when it begins spreading out from a source, and the horizontal lines indicate how the original quantity of light becomes more diffuse and spreads out as time goes by. Since energy waves travel infinite distances the triangle becomes bigger and the slices become wider and the energy becomes less intense along the wave front.