Kinetic & Potential Energy Calculator
Energy and momentum of a moving or raised mass.
How it works
Kinetic energy is ½mv², potential energy is mgh.
The square on velocity is the important part. Doubling speed quadruples kinetic energy — and therefore quadruples the braking distance, and quadruples the energy a crash structure has to absorb. It is the reason speed limits matter far more than they intuitively seem to.
An object dropped from height h arrives at √(2gh), independent of its mass — Galileo's result, and the same energy equation rearranged.