The notion of a universe running on a set of basic laws appealed to the founders of science. The search for those laws has led us on a fitful and complicated journey.  Physicists have uncovered many of those laws and continue to do so at huge particle accelerators where they  smash apart the building blocks of matter in order to understand what could have possibly happened ~15 billion years ago to bring about this universe. The abstract idea of “energy” seems to hold our understanding together. Using the square of the speed of light as a conversion factor, energy and matter may trade places under the right conditions. This concept of a conserved quantity is strange enough, especially when that quantity is not directly measurable. Energy is the logical result of the way we have defined our interaction with the universe. In a mechanical universe, change comes at a cost.