Direction of forces in conservative force fields ↩

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created: 2022-07-01 23:05:19
modified: 2022-07-01 23:28:32

In a conservative force field

, let the potential energy be denoted by

. Now, the relation between them is:

And since the gradient points in the direction of the steepest derivative, it will be perpendicular to the equipotential surface, since the equipotential surface's tangent vectors point in the direction where the derivative is zero.