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Welcome to our Physics lesson on What is Potential Energy?, this is the first lesson of our suite of physics lessons covering the topic of Gravitational Potential Energy, you can find links to the other lessons within this tutorial and access additional physics learning resources below this lesson.
In the Physics Tutorial "Work. Energy. Types of Energy", the following definition regarding potential energy was provided:
Potential Energy represents the energy stored in a system when no change of system's structure is considered. This stored energy can be converted into other forms of energy in certain conditions.
Since Potential Energy is a stored energy, it is an energy of state. Therefore, it depends of the parameters of the system.
In general, the parameters that affect the value of potential energy of a certain system (remember, a system is composed by at least two interacting objects) and all physical quantities involved in their interaction, are:
Therefore, the general formula of potential energy is
As you can see, this formula is very similar to that of Work (remember from the first tutorial of this chapter mentioned earlier, we had W = F⃗ × r⃗ as well. Therefore, we can draw a very important conclusion regarding potential energy:
"Potential energy PE represents the work done by one of the objects in the system (usually the largest) to bring the other object from the position r⃗ to zero, i.e. to bring it at the place where the first object is."
In other words, Potential Energy is the energy possessed by an object due to its position relative to other objects.
The negative sign provides the convention that work done against a force field increases the potential energy, while work done by the force field decreases the potential energy.
The following paragraph helps fixing in your mind the above rule as it represents the most important part of this tutorial.
You have reached the end of Physics lesson 5.3.1 What is Potential Energy?. There are 3 lessons in this physics tutorial covering Gravitational Potential Energy, you can access all the lessons from this tutorial below.
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