In physics, you call potential, electrical potential or gravitational potential, the potential energy.
You can install a disk in your car, which I would call, then, a flywheel, And you can convert the gravitational potential energy.
Notice the gravitational potential energy goes down.
Hence, the loss of gravitational potential energy of the block equals the gain of elastic potential energy of the spring.
You might be winded doing it the second way, but when you get to the top and you are at the 60th story your gravitational potential is independent of how you got there.
Let me first give you the formal definition of gravitational potential energy.
Notice that the gravitational potential energy increases.
This is the gravitational potential energy.
When I'm here, gravitational potential energy ; increases in this way; the gravitational force is in this direction.
Okay, my goal was to evaluate for you the gravitational potential energy the way that it is defined in general, not in a special case when we are near the Earth.
In this paper the secondary derivitative change of gravitational potential before Tangshan earthquake observed in Xiji seismic station near Beijing is presented.
