 The curriculum states that energy is neither created nor destroyed but can be transferred from one object to another or transformed from one form to another. And so I thought we'd talk a little bit more about what that means. So if you imagine a boiling pot, first of all I want to discuss some concepts around the transfer of heat or thermal energy. We usually consider these in three ways. So the first one is if we have a hot source, if you hold your hand up to it you can feel radiation, you can feel the heat that's radiating off that heat source. So we think about that as radiation. And there's also another one which is conduction, which is the direct conduction of heat from one object to another. And so if we were boiling a pot like this we might touch a metal hand or it might burn our hand so we might recognise that as conduction. And then there's the third one which is where there's some heat from the heat source here which is the hot ring, the gas stove to the water in the pot that causes the water to move and that movement of the water due to the thermal energy transfer is we call that convection. But if we get back to the original statement which is that energy can either be created nor destroyed, only transferred or transformed then what that really means in this scenario is if we think about the flame, we're just going to think about the flame down here for a start it has certain kinds of energy associated with it. So it definitely has thermal energy associated with it. You know it's hot, thermal energy. I'm going to use this symbol for energy. I hope that's alright. And then so thermal energy is heat and then we can see it so it's also giving off some light energy. And then you've also seen the flickering of the flame so in a small way there's also a little bit of kinetic energy. Okay so there are the sources of energy but by far and away the one that's the most important here as far as boiling our pot of water is concerned is the thermal energy. Now it turns out that the water up here now because it's boiling has two main kinds of energy it has thermal energy because it's heated up and it has kinetic energy because of the movement, the convection of the water. So I've kind of probably drawn this a bit awkwardly but what we're seeing here then is a couple of things going on. The first one is that the main thing that's causing the water to boil from down here is the thermal energy or heat. And if we have a situation where we have thermal energy here from the source and thermal energy here then that's a direct transfer of energy. It's the same energy type that's being transferred from one place to another. So the heat energy from here is transferring heat energy here but the heat energy here that is being applied to the boiling water is also causing it to move. So the heat energy or thermal energy is also causing kinetic energy. So the difference there is that that's a transformation. It's going from one type of energy, thermal energy to another type of energy, kinetic energy. So when we say that energy is neither created nor destroyed it turns out that the thermal energy here is being used in this system. The light energy is being dissipated and dissipation is an interesting thing but it is also a bona fide transfer of energy and then the little bit of kinetic energy we're just seeing as motion but essentially the key point here is that thermal energy to thermal energy is transfer and thermal energy to kinetic energy is transformation and this whole concept of neither creating nor destroying energy but transferring it or transforming it is known as the first law of thermodynamics.