So I did some research on magnetic generators and what kind of energy magnets loose when they move something. Turns out magnets loose potential energy (you need to expend energy to get the object moved closer to or further away from the magnet again,) similarly to how the energy used to get something into space becomes the potential energy stored in the distance that object can then fall. So then I thought, “what if I deleted or blew the Earth up after spending energy to get away from it". So what would happen if I did that?
Thermodynamics – What Happens if Earth is Destroyed After Leaving It?
energy-conservationexplosionspotential energythermodynamics
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It seems hard for me to grasp that energy can physically be stored within the positioning of an object?
If you place a huge boulder at the edge of a large cliff, and give it a small poke just as a bear is ambling below, the bear below will be completely obliterated upon impact by the boulder. There was definitely energy released in the concomitant bear annihilation; where did it come from?
Well, the energy was physically stored in the positioning of the boulder.
Unfortunately, if you are looking for a deeper physical intuitive understanding of why this is, you probably won't find one. You can devise various formalisms, such as the notion of an underlying gravitational potential well $U_\text{grav}(h)=mgh$, but to some extent, you simply might have to accept as an axiom that energy can be stored in the form of work performed against a potential, since that seems to be how physical reality operates.
There are probably more mathematically complicated or physically elegant ways to encode this basic idea, so I'll await other users explanations, but hopefully the above gives some small measure of insight.
So, the stored potential energy decreases when the plates are pushed closer together. Is this correct?
Correct. But the plates don't get "pushed" together, they get pulled together by the attractive force between them. In order that they can move together it would have to be an air gap capacitor. An air gap capacitor needs some means to hold the plates apart. Without getting into the practical aspects of air gap capacitors, let's imagine the following:
On end of a relaxed coil spring is connected to one plate of the capacitor and the other end of the spring connected to some fixed object. The mechanism for keeping the plates apart is then removed. The force of attraction between the plates pulls on the plate connected to the spring stretching the spring. This causes the spring to acquired elastic potential energy, which comes from the decrease in the electrical potential energy of the capacitor.
In effect the capacitor loses potential energy because negative work must be done by an external agent when the plates to move together.
Hope this helps.
Best Answer
"Deleted" and "blew up" are not the same thing. If you could cause the Earth to explode into a symmetrical, expanding cloud of countless billions of fragments (i.e., if you "blew it up,") then that cloud still would have the same mass as the original Earth, and it still would have the same center of mass. So long as you and your spaceship stayed outside of that cloud, you would feel no change: The gravitational field outside of the cloud still would be the same as the Earth's original gravitational field.
If you could cause the Earth to simply vanish, then you would be violating the laws of physics unless you could account for where all of the Earth's mass and energy went.