势能
The term "potential energy" was introduced by the 19th-century Scottish engineer and physicist William Rankine, although it has links to Greek philosopher Aristotle's concept of potentiality. Potential energy is associated with forces that act on a body in a way that the total work done by these forces on the body depends only on the initial and final positions of the body in space. These forces, that are called "conservative forces", can be represented at every point in space by vectors expressed as gradients of a certain scalar function called "potential".