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Geopotential is the potential of the Earth's gravity field.For convenience it is often defined as the negative of the potential energy per unit mass, so that the gravity vector is obtained as the gradient of the geopotential, without the negation.
The intuitive idea of Birkhoff's theorem is that a spherically symmetric gravitational field should be produced by some massive object at the origin; if there were another concentration of mass–energy somewhere else, this would disturb the spherical symmetry, so we can expect the solution to represent an isolated object. That is, the field ...
This also can be expressed (multiplying by the gravitational constant G in order to change units) as newtons per kilogram of attracted mass. Potential is expressed as gravity times distance, m 2 ·s −2. Travelling one metre in the direction of a gravity vector of strength 1 m·s −2 will increase your potential by 1 m 2 ·s −2.
For a spherical body of uniform density, the gravitational binding energy U is given in Newtonian gravity by the formula [2] [3] = where G is the gravitational constant, M is the mass of the sphere, and R is its radius.
In general relativity, the metric tensor (in this context often abbreviated to simply the metric) is the fundamental object of study.The metric captures all the geometric and causal structure of spacetime, being used to define notions such as time, distance, volume, curvature, angle, and separation of the future and the past.
For two pairwise interacting point particles, the gravitational potential energy is the work that an outside agent must do in order to quasi-statically bring the masses together (which is therefore, exactly opposite the work done by the gravitational field on the masses): = = where is the displacement vector of the mass, is gravitational force acting on it and denotes scalar product.
Geopotential height or geopotential altitude is a vertical coordinate referenced to Earth's mean sea level (assumed zero geopotential) that represents the work involved in lifting one unit of mass over one unit of length through a hypothetical space in which the acceleration of gravity is assumed constant. [1]
In mathematics and mathematical physics, potential theory is the study of harmonic functions.. The term "potential theory" was coined in 19th-century physics when it was realized that two fundamental forces of nature known at the time, namely gravity and the electrostatic force, could be modeled using functions called the gravitational potential and electrostatic potential, both of which ...