Well, I haven't dropped a journal in quite some time, and something finally bothered me enough for me to write something about it.

As some of my watchers may know, I am a lover of good (and sometimes really really bad) science fiction. One thing frequently crops up in that writing though that makes me want to scream. Why? Because it's garbage science, a phrase that's a holdover from bad writing back when science fiction was a dirty word not to be uttered from the mouths of respectable writers. What is this?

"Pure energy". Oooh, how I hate that phrase. It makes my skin crawl and all my tails twitch. "What's wrong with it?" You ask? In a word, everything .

Energy is defined pretty simply: it's the ability to do work. Nothing more, nothing less. There is no "pure" form of this. It comes in many forms Heat, motion, the potential to do work, electromagnetics (spanning a vast swath of things and including visible light and heat and microwaves and ultraviolet and more).
Thus, there is no such thing as pure energy, it has to come from something, and that something defines how we use it.
This brings us to two of the most misused forms of energy: the often incorrectly referenced atomic and nuclear, which an AWFUL lot of folks assume are different and indeed energy. No, my friends, the distinction between the two comes to us not from science but from the government: atomic frequently referred to fission weapons, while nuclear referred to fission-fusion weapons, also called thermonuclear.
Energy without defining where it comes from is useless. Since it is only the ABILITY to do work, not the work itself, nor how to get work out of it, the "pure" part makes no sense. It is, at best, pointless, at worst misleading, leaving folk to mistakenly assume that there's a strange form they can't define out there. It's sloppy, poor writing when used, and points to an unwillingness to work out details. It doesn't take much to slap on a definition and dump the word "pure" out of there.