Spanish Banner: Intercambio de Enlaces
Spanish Banner: Intercambio de Enlaces.

Potential Energy



Maria and Phil were reading a secret file in the new "fountain room". Most of the other project students were there. The fountain had been added a week ago. There was a statue of Icarus with wings. Water streams formed a circle around the statue, each stream spraying up, toward the center. There were colored lights under the water in the fountain.
The file started with a discussion of potential energy, how a child has potential energy at the top of the slide, and how at the bottom, the potential energy is zero.
A photo showed a child sitting in a swing. A second child was twisting the swing to "wind up" her friend, and then she would let go and her friend would spin. The caption explained that the work of the second child went into creating potential energy.
A graph plotted the increase in energy that occurred as two atoms were brought closer together.
The next picture showed a bicycle rider peddling up a fifty meter hill. At the top she rode down ten meters. The caption explained that she had acquired the potential energy equivalent to a forty meter hill. She would have to do the work of a ten meter hill before she could enjoy the fifty meters of potential energy.
The system would acquire energy from the sun. Giant mirrors would focus rays at a sphere (actually a series of spheres within spheres). The outer shell of the sphere would transmit the energy to the center of the sphere where it would begin the process of modifying the packing structure of the atoms of a sphere, and then creating the field necessary to modify the packing structure of the atoms of the second sphere, until all the spheres were "loaded" with energy. Enough energy would be stored in the center to activate the reverse project. To use the bicycle analogy, the rider would make sure she had enough energy to climb the ten meters so from there she could ride down the fifty meters.


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