Bandersnatch said:
All those interactions, like gravity, EM, nuclear forces, produce force fields. If you then place a particle which interacts with a given field, within that field (e.g., an electron in an electric field), it will have potential energy associated with its position (not motion). It is stored in the configuration of the system. Changing the configuration either releases the energy in some other form, or requires input of some other form or energy.
Do you mean that the energy is embedded/locked up inside a field, and even though it’s not physically there (yet) for our eyes to see, and for our computers to be measured, it’s potentially there, conserved in the field, and this genie can come out of his bottle, so to speak? So this field didn’t generate energy out of nothing (of course not, that would be impossible), but it already existed, kind of 'locked up' behind/inside the field, and can be requested/called up?
This leads me to an example question: how is the arrangement of atoms in for instance the molecule glucose, or the arrangement of alkanes in oil, holding potential energy, which by its shape contains more energy than the same amount of atoms in a molecule with another configuration? Glucose is like 'a ball on top of a hill', and glucose can be broken down that releases energy, just like a ball can 'fall down the hill' that gives energy. This ball obviously has gravitational energy, so the metaphor doesn't apply in the same way, because the potential energy of glucose has nothing to do with gravity, so what's the difference? Does glucose conserve its energy in this 'hidden' energy field, like a genie in a bottle? It is "
stored in the configuration of the system", like you said?
Glucose (C6H12O6) + 6 x O2 <--- can be broken/formed by ---> 6 x CO2, 6 x H2O + energy (photons). The difference of the two is heat energy. So the extra energy that’s locked up in the glucose molecule is not there to be measured (because it's not moving or anything), but is this also residing in a field the same way? Because the C atoms, H atoms or O atoms in glucose ar not all of a sudden in a different (or more excided) state than the same atoms when it's NOT glucose, right?
Or is this a totally different case, and I'm way off track here by comparing them?