help please

[winkle]

will someone tell me if this is saying what i think it is saying
it's just a arbitrary choice to make things easy


Why choose a convention where gravitational energy is negative?

As with all potential energies, only differences in gravitational potential energy matter for most physical purposes, and the choice of zero point is arbitrary. Given that there is no reasonable criterion for preferring one particular finite r over another, there seem to be only two reasonable choices for the distance at which U becomes zero: r = 0 and . The choice of U = 0 at infinity may seem peculiar, and the consequence that gravitational energy is always negative may seem counterintuitive, but allows this choice allows gravitational potential energy values to be finite, albeit negative.
The singularity at r = 0 in the formula for gravitational potential energy means that the only other apparently reasonable alternative choice of convention, with U = 0 for r = 0, would result in potential energy being positive, but infinitely large for all nonzero values of r, and would make calculations involving sums or differences of potential energies beyond what is possible with the real number system. Since physicists abhor infinities in their calculations, and r is always non-zero in practice, the choice of U = 0 at infinity is by far the more preferable choice, even if the idea of negative energy appears to be peculiar at first.

[BIBLEAL1]

Hi Scott

We have general discussion, off topic ,fraud , tech support and community buzz forum sites.

I would like to suggest another forum to be named Philosophical Foolishness. You could dump a lot of posts into this category to keep this forum more serious and centered on its purpose which is to discuss about solving Besslers wheel.

We also could have nominations for the post most helpful in the past year (I nominate Rocky with his clue list)

BIBLEAL1

[DrWhat]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_energy

See where the text matches!

Winkle, always good to quote your reference source.

[Ealadha]

I would like to suggest another forum to be named Philosophical Foolishness.

For conventional science theories .