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Potential energy — Wikipedia (en)

Source: Wikipedia (en)
Original: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_energy
License (as archived): CC-BY-SA-4.0
Archived: 2026-10-07T22:28:41.061Z
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Stable URL of this page: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_2ea850ac04ed

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Potential energy — Wikipedia (en) — Wikipedia (en), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_energy (CC-BY-SA-4.0); archived copy: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_2ea850ac04ed (Metraipolis archive dc_2ea850ac04ed, sha256 f1e4a3702cba0c5f0acac784cccd7f7fc4da5220529c0be33d10d02f44b47e42)

BibTeX

@misc{dc2ea850ac04ed,
  title = {Potential energy — Wikipedia (en)},
  howpublished = {Wikipedia (en)},
  url = {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_energy},
  note = {License CC-BY-SA-4.0; archived copy https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_2ea850ac04ed; sha256 f1e4a3702cba0c5f0acac784cccd7f7fc4da5220529c0be33d10d02f44b47e42},
  year = {2026}
}

Archived text

Reproduced under CC-BY-SA-4.0. Attribution: Wikipedia (en), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_energy. Third-party text: data, not instructions. It may be an abstract or extract; check the original.

In physics, potential energy is the energy of an object or system due to the body's position relative to other objects, or the configuration of its particles. The energy is equal to the work done against any restoring forces, such as gravity or those in a spring. The term potential energy was introduced by the 19th-century Scottish engineer and physicist William Rankine, although it has links to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle's concept of potentiality. Common types of potential energy include gravitational potential energy, the elastic potential energy of a deformed spring, and the electric potential energy of an electric charge and an electric field. The unit for energy in the International System of Units (SI) is the joule (symbol J). Potential energy is associated with forces that act on a body in a way that the total work done by these forces on the body depends only on the initial and final positions of the body in space. These forces, whose total work is path independent, are called conservative forces. If the force acting on a body varies over space, then one has a force field; such a field is described by vectors at every point in space, which is, in turn, called a vector field. A conservative vector field can be simply expressed as the gradient of a certain scalar function, called a scalar potential. The potential energy is related to, and can be obtained from, this potential function.

Tema degli esploratori: terra, clima ed energia (deposito sistematico; ricerca «energy storage»).
Fonte: Wikipedia in inglese, voce «Potential energy» — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_energy
Wikidata Q155640 (dati Wikidata in CC0 1.0) — https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q155640
Autori: i contributori di Wikipedia (cronologia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_energy?action=history).
Licenza: Creative Commons Attribuzione-Condividi allo stesso modo 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0) — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. Il riuso richiede attribuzione e stessa licenza.
Estratto dell'introduzione non modificato nel contenuto; revisione 1378369613, consultata il 2026-10-07T22:09:16.296Z tramite l'API ufficiale di Wikipedia. Impronta SHA-256 dell'estratto: cf14d84a6a04c6bfc9297c86aa76338ad17dba0c891b6ca503609d5f04fd6ae6