Negative importance.
By the way, the idea of negative potential energy is fundamental to how the universe works, not just batteries. Some scientists believe that it could be the answer the time old question - “if energy is always conserved, then where did all the energy come from in the first place?” The hypothesis is that all the positive energy, kinetic (including heat and electromagnetic), positive potential energy (like charge repulsion) and mass itself (through mass energy equivalence) has been borrowed from attractive fields, leaving lots of negative potential energy behind.
So yes, you really can get energy from nothing, just as long as you leave behind negative potential energy. The catch is that you have to supply the components of whatever is going to be storing that negative energy, and you can only recover those components by putting the energy back in.
By the way, the idea of negative potential energy is fundamental to how the universe works, not just batteries. Some scientists believe that it could be the answer the time old question - “if energy is always conserved, then where did all the energy come from in the first place?” The hypothesis is that all the positive energy, kinetic (including heat and electromagnetic), positive potential energy (like charge repulsion) and mass itself (through mass energy equivalence) has been borrowed from attractive fields, leaving lots of negative potential energy behind.
So yes, you really can get energy from nothing, just as long as you leave behind negative potential energy. The catch is that you have to supply the components of whatever is going to be storing that negative energy, and you can only recover those components by putting the energy back in.
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