Okay, today I encountered something that I never realized/thought of properly. What is the difference between electric potential and electric potential energy?
The main difference can be easily found by analyzing the units:
- electric potential is a quantity in volts or - equivalently - joules per coulomb.
- electric potential energy is energy, in joules.
electric potential is electric potential energy divided by the charge of the test particle.Ain't that simple?
You can draw a similar relationship between electric field (NC-1) and electric force field (N) (since they are simply gradients of the electric potential and electric potential energy respectively).
Note: all of these also apply to gravitation.


0 comments:
Post a Comment