Why do scientists add infinity to things like bringing a charge from infinity, putting something on infinity, making an image on infinity when it’s just a concept and doesn’t actually exist.

Question

And also get mad at it because it came in their equation so it must hat some sort of mistake.

In: Physics

Answer 1

in science there is often the concept of thought experiments where you think of the absolute edge case that can’t ever actually have in real life and try to relate that to how things react in the real world, and ideally your model should explain both accurately.

Even though you can’t actually bring a charge from infinity, it’s helpful to think of what would happen if and when the charge had zero potential energy. from that you can then say the formula for potential energy is this, it’s never zero and that’s why we almost always measure it relative to something else