/diy/ - Do It Yourself

>>2548665
ill give it a go.
imagine a ball at rest at the top of a hill. the ball then starts to roll down the hill at pick up more and more speed as it goes. eventually it reaches the bottom of the hill, and this will be the balls top speed. you might be tempted to say that the ball started its journey with zero energy (since it was at rest), and reached the bottom with a lot of energy. this is okay, but in physics we like to conserve energy to make calculations easier. so instead, we usually say that the ball started with a bunch of "potential energy", and we might say that specifically it was "gravitational potential energy", and as the ball rolled down the hill more and more of this potential energy was converted in kinetic energy. when the ball reaches the bottom of the hill, it will have lost an amount of potential energy exactly equal to its kinetic energy (assuming it didnt lose energy through other means, like friction).
if you replace "gravity" and "ball" in this analogy with "electricity" and "charge", then you would end up with "electrical potential", which is a fancy term for voltage. although we dont say that charges have electric potential, we say that regions of space have electric potential. for example, if the bottom of a AA battery is at 0 volts, then the top is at 1.5 volts. the unit "volt" is equivalent to "joules per couloumb" (which are units for energy and charge, if you didnt know). so if you had a 1 couloumb charge and moved it from the top of a AA battery to the bottom, it would gain 1.5 joules of energy, probably in the form of speed. its important to note that voltage is all relative; if you stack two AA batteries on top of each other, the top of the upper one will be at 3 volts even though the field inside didnt actually change. its like if you stacked two ladders on top of each other to get twice as high.
ill continue if someone wants.