I guess everything can be regarded as different aspects of the same thing because of this conviction we have that the same laws of physics can be used to describe everything in the universe. Clearly it's not very useful to do that. We have to have different quantities with different units of measurement.Yes, obviously the two terms are defined differently in science. I was merely showing how, philosophically speaking, they can be reduced to two different aspects of the same thing.
You probably think I'm being pedantic but I wouldn't use the term "potential force". Just "potential energy".When this Something is active and manifest to our senses, we say "a force is acting" or "a force is being applied", and when this Something is not being manifest to our senses, but we are referring to it conceptually, we speak about "energy". If a certain quantity of energy is said to be present, then a certain amount of potential force is also said to be present.
As suggested by A Poster He Or I in post #2, I don't think they're talking about energy in any classically recognizable sense at all. It's just a label that is convenient for now. It may turn out to be useful to continue to think of it as analogous to the mass/energy concept that we're more familiar with. It may not. It'll probably continue to be referred to as "dark energy" even if not. Labels stick.The idea is that when scientists speak of "dark energy", they are merely referring to the energy that theoretically must be present in order for the force of accelerating expansion to be applicable, which it apparently is. Just like mass (E=MC2) is the "energy" which also must theoretically exist in order for the force of gravity to be applicable, which it also apparently is.
I think physics is so steeped in metaphor that it can be easy to fall into the trap of taking things too literally. For example, we still talk about electric and magnetic "flux" when referring to electromagnetic fields as if those fields were a liquid that flows out from sources and into sinks. We talk about electrons and "holes" (the absence of electrons) in semiconductors and treat the holes as "things" like the electrons. We talk about quantum mechanical "spin" even though it bares only a metaphorical relationship to classical spin. We talk about the "curvature" of space-time. We envisage electrons around a nucleus as being like fuzzy versions of planets orbiting a star. All metaphors, originating in our need to get hold of an intuitive, visualizable sense of how things work and not just represent it as pure mathematics.
When the concept of energy, as it is understood in physics, was being formed, along with the laws of thermodynamics, it was also very much thought of as a kind of fluid that can flow from one place to another. This fluid, in the context of heat energy, even had a name: caloric.