Many of the primitive notions that emerge in scientific theories don't correspond to a category like "object I can hold in my hand". Energy is one. Momentum is

Many of the primitive notions that emerge in scientific theories don't correspond to a category like "object I can hold in my hand". Energy is one. Momentum is another. Gene and species in biology. Electronegativity in chemistry. Power dynamic in history. Schema in child psychology. > What is the 'it' that's being transformed? This is exactly what led to the caloric theory of heat. But nonphysical transfer isn't terribly slippery. Take a rumor. I whisper to someone, who whispers to someone...there is no physical transfer here, merely a transfer of configuration. Transfer of energy, like transfer of genes, is more like that. Nor need it correspond to any particular physical part of a thing, e.g., where is the sarcasm in a sentence? Locally conserved invariants like energy or momentum don't correspond to any of the categories that we learn in childhood, but that doesn't make them particularly slippery, just unfamiliar.