The Victorians were obsessed with the empirical but were frequently frustrated by the sizeable gaps in their understanding of the world around them. This study examines how literature and popular culture adopted the emerging language of physics to explain the unknown or "imponderable." Writers such as Charles Dickens, William Morris and Joseph Conrad used recent concepts such as energy, entropy and atom theory to explore key issues of capitalism, imperialism and social unrest. In doing so, they created a fresh vocabulary, helping to make sense of the new experiences of modernity.