Some physical quantities like position, velocity, momentum and force, have precise definition even on basic textbooks, however energy is a little confusing for me. My point here is: using our intuition we know what momentum should be and also we know that defining it as $p = mv$ is a good definition. Also, based on Newton's law we can intuit and define what forces are.
However, when it comes to energy many textbooks become a little "circular". They first try to define work, and after some arguments they just give a formula $W = F\cdot r$ without motivating or giving intuition about this definition. Then they say that work is variation of energy and they never give a formal definition of energy. I've heard that "energy is a number that remains unchanged after any process that a system undergoes", however I think that this is not so good for three reasons: first because momentum is also conserved, so it fits this definition and it's not energy, second because recently I've heard that on general relativity there's a loss of some conservation laws and third because conservation of energy can be derived as consequence of other definitions.
So, how energy is defined formally in a way that fits both classical and modern physics without falling into circular arguments?
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