Potencijal

Potencijal is a term used in several South Slavic languages, including Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin, meaning potential. In everyday language it denotes capacity, possibility, or latent qualities of a person, system, or situation. In scientific and mathematical contexts, potencijal often refers to a quantity from which other quantities can be derived, or to a field that determines such quantities.

In physics, potential energy is the energy stored by a system due to its position in a conservative field. It depends only on the configuration, not on the path taken to reach it. Examples include gravitational potential energy Ug = mgh near a planet’s surface and elastic potential energy in springs, U = 1/2 kx^2. Electric potential is the work per unit charge required to assemble a charge distribution; the potential difference between two points equals the negative line integral of the electric field, and the electric field itself is the negative gradient of the potential: E = -∇V.

In mathematics, potential theory studies potentials and harmonic functions. A potential function is a scalar field whose gradient is related to a given force field. Many problems are formulated via Poisson or Laplace equations. The Newtonian potential of a measure μ is the integral with kernel 1/|x−y|; harmonic functions satisfy Δφ = 0. Concepts such as capacity and Green’s functions are central to the theory.

Beyond physics and mathematics, potencijal also appears in everyday language to describe the capacity or likelihood of achieving something, the potential of a process, or the capability of a device. The adjectives potencijalni and the adverb potencijalno derive from the noun.