/sci/ - Science & Math

Squeeze a spring tightly in your hand and hold it compressed

Feel it in your hand fighting to break free?

That is elastic potential energy

>>10567251
you create place with really low energy, potential energy of surrounding space gets into this negative potential, if you can guarantee flowing of potential to negative place faster that than is required to guarantee flow of potential, than you have device with so much potential energy that when we account time in the equation it's practically very large because thinking "all of that" requires so much time you don't really have in your lifetime, but it's free energy, why to worry?

>>10567251
There are two kinds of energy, potential and kinetic. Potential energy is energy of position, kinetic energy is energy of motion.

In a gravitational field, the higher you lift something, the more gravitational potential energy you give it. When you release the object, all the potential energy converts to kinetic energy (minus a small loss to friction, or entropy).

In an electric field, when you separate unlike charges (or conversely bring like charges together), you give them electrical potential energy. You can also cause this by "lifting" a charged particle to a higher electrical potential (voltage) and letting it "fall" through a wire to a lower electrical potential (ground). This is how electric current works. As the charged particle is "released" (circuit completed) it's charge falls through the wire from positive to negative poles on the battery. In the process of current flow, the charge's electrical potential energy is converted to kinetic energy, which is moving charge, which is a current.

In general relativitity, mass is potential energy (i.e. stored energy), and velocity is kinetic energy. As mass is converted from potential to kinetic, it is consumed, and turned into energy (as with the "mass defect" in a nuclear explosion).

>>10567310
wat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability

>>10567251
It doesn’t work, at least not yet.

>>10567251
Nature likes things to be in the lowest local energy states. When you move a system away from those minima, for example lifting an object or compressing a spring, you must impart energy to do so. The potential energy is that energy required to displace a system from a local equilibrium, or alternately the difference in energy between the mimina and the current position of the system in the potential well.

>>10567251
Potential energy doesn't work. It's stored energy.
Kinetic energy does the work.

>>10567251
Energy thatis yet to happen

>>10567251
If you put in effort to cycle up a hill, you can get that effort back by going downhill without doing anything

>>10568786
You get more efford downhill, you can go straight up and crooked down, therefore your total spend energy on trip downhill will be bigger.

>>10568890
Is this bait?

>>10567251
It only potentially works. No guarantees.

>>10569155
It's like when plane is doing spirals down, what's the difference to work it does do when it falls on the ground?

How do you count work being done?

delta distance mass / time is power?

I have no idea, because "physics" have retarded concept of delta.

>>10567340
>there are two kinds of energy
are you a fucking nigger?

>>10567251
Imagine a ladder and a hammer
At first the hammer is lying on the floor, it has very low potential energy. It's probably just going to sit there doing fuck all forever, if no one messes with it.
Now pick that hammer up, climb to the top of the ladder, and just hold it.
What do you think would happen if you let go of that hammer?

read feynmans explanation of energy in the character of physical law.

>>10567251
Everything is cyclical. By performing work, you are in actuality perturbing the closed-form ground state; potential energy is the cycle's eventual need to collapse back to its ground configuration.

>>10570722
but what if the floor is made of nitroglycerin? how does that affect the potential energy of a hammer dropped from, say a meter

>>10571856
It doesn't. The hammer would transfer some energy to the nitro and from then on it's a chemical cascade from the nitro's own energy.

>>10571943
Could say theres potential energy in the nitrogen bonds?

>>10571943
what is the gravitational potential energy of binary stars orbiting each other?

>>10572255
a fuckton

>>10572274
what if one's made of ice and the other of lava

>>10567603
heh