/sci/ - Science & Math

Should I go to office hours every week if I have actual computation/conceptual questions or would I just annoy the fuck out of the math professor?

Can someone explain potential energy to me in a way a retard could understand?
I have a ball on top of a cliff. The cliff is 10 units high. Thus the ball has 10 units of potential energy that is converted to kinetic energy when I push the ball off the cliff.
But if I were to dig a little bit of the earth up, the distance between the top of the cliff and the bottom of the cliff is now 11 units. The ball didn't do anything, I just moved some shit around.
Additionally, I could load the ball unto a cannon and fire it somewhere. I can do anything with this ball. Doesn't this mean the ball has infinite potential energy? And every particle in the universe has infinite potential energy? Does it just exist as a concept to explain events that have already occurred? Why do we have it?