Note 31 — The Contraction Hypothesis

You may wonder why, having said that the sun contains 2,000 quadrillion tons of energy at the most, I now assume that it contains just this amount. It is really only a verbal point depending on the scientific definition of energy. All mass is mass of something, and we now call that something ‘energy’ whether it is one of the familiar forms of energy or not. You will see in the next sentence that we do not assume that the energy is convertible into known forms, so that it is a terminology which commits us to nothing.