Energetics' aims
In general, energetics is concerned with seeking principles that accurately describe the useful and non-useful tendencies of energy flows and storages under transformation.
“Principles” are understood here as phenomena which behave like historical invariants under multiple observations. When some critical number of people have observed such invariance,
such a principle is usually the given the status of a “fundamental law” (“physical/scientific law”) of science, which according to the Oxford English dictionary is “a theoretical principle deduced from particular facts, applicable to a defined group or class of phenomena, and expressible by the statement that a particular phenomenon always occurs of certain conditions be present.”
Like in all science, whether or not a theorem or principle is considered a fundamental law appears to depend on how many people agree to such proposition. The ultimate aim of energetics therefore is the description of fundamental laws. Philosophers of science have held that the four fundamental laws of thermodynamics, which define the fundamental physical quantities (temperature, energy, and entropy) that characterize thermodynamic systems, can be treated as the laws of energetics (Reiser 1926, p. 432). Through the clarification of these laws energetics aims to produce reliable predictions about energy flow and storage transformations at any scale; nano to macro.
