# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged electric-circuits

15

You're actually hitting on a very famous concept here that revolutionized physics!! Your understanding is almost wholly correct and your analogy is a good one - excellent reasoning - the only thing missing is radiation from the system. This latter lack is mostly irrelevant for the level of question you have been thinking about: but I'll address that below. ...

13

where does that electricity go? The photons from the sun have energy and momentum, but not "electricity". Essentially, a photon (solar or otherwise) striking the solar panel can create an electron-hole pair (EHP) and, if the EHP is within or near the depletion zone, the pair will be separated by the built-in electric field. This results in a ...

10

AC or DC, you only get electrocuted if current passes through your body. (Current passing through any part of your body can be dangerous, and possibly cause an electrical burn, but current passing across your heart is the one that's really dangerous.) Touching just one wire at a time gives the current nowhere much to go. You are right to think that some ...

10

Batteries do not behave in such an ideal way across all conditions. The simplest model of a battery as a circuit element is the one you describe - a pure voltage source. A slightly-more sophisticated model is as a voltage source connected to a fixed resistor, called the battery's internal resistance. A typical battery has an internal resistance of between 1 ...

10

instead of thinking your body is empty and that a charged wire has to push electrons one by one through you and into the ground (blood is actually full of charge carriers), a better analogy would be a very long queue of pushy people. if the entrance to the apple store doesn't open, it doesn't matter how hard the guy at the back pushes--nothing moves. ...

8

Why are wires in simple circuits approximated as equipotentials? Because one of the three assumptions of circuit theory is: All electrical effects happen instantaneously throughout a circuit. If the circuit is small enough compared to the wave length of the signals applied, all electric signals travel through it so quickly, that we can assume that they ...

8

I find this sort of thing becomes much more intuitive if you can think of an analogy in terms of water. In this case, we can think of it like this: Here we have water flowing through a hole in a bath tub, into another tub underneath. The stick figure has been given the task of keeping the water level constant, by lifting water back up into the top tub ...

7

Electrons that reach the positive terminal indeed remain there. The potential difference between the two terminals pushes electrons from the negative anode toward the positive cathode. When an electron reaches the cathode, it stays there to equalize the original charge imbalance between the two nodes. When electrochemical redox reaction sustaining the ...

7

A human body may reflect and absorb radio frequencies, though not very efficiently. It may as well act as a resonance chamber for certain frequencies. For a signal of 100 MHz, the involved wavelength is 3 m, and so it is possible that parts of your body are acting slightly as a resonant chamber. (for an optimal resonance, you should have 1.5 m diameter, too ...

7

Actually, induction works, although it is often used a bit differently than you described. You can place a warm superconductor loop into a normal coil. As you switch the coil on, there will be some current inside the superconductor, but since it is not cold yet, this current quickly dies down. Then you cool the superconductor below its critical temperature. ...

7

Alfred got in before me, but I have a diagram! I've marked all continuous bits of wire in the same colour, and marked the corresponding colours on the ends of the resistors. A quick redraw later and I get: which is a lot simpler!

7

Gregsan's and Kieran's answers are insightful analogies and the pushy electrons are certainly part of the answer. There is another aspect to the "decision" process and that is the propagation of electromagnetic waves. There is a chapter in the second volume of the Feynman Lectures on Physics - I don't have it with me but the relevant section will be just ...

6

The voltage across either horizontal resistor is zero so they can be removed from the circuit without changing the solution. This is most easily seen by simply removing the two horizontal resistors and then it's clear that the nodes the horizontal resistors connect to each have the same voltage. Thus, by Ohm's law, there is no current through either ...

6

Indeed, AC can flow without a "complete circuit" - that's what happens in LC circuits all the time. An LC circuit is technically not complete - the capacitor of LC circuit contains an insulator between its plates and so electrons are unable to flow through the capacitor (unless it fails). Still the oscillations in the LC circuit happen because of alternating ...

6

There does not need to be an magnetic field in the inductor for there to be "back emf" (I would prefer "induced emf"). The induced emf is the consequence of a changing magnetic field and not of a magnetic field itself and hence there can be a changing magnetic field even at zero magnetic field (something like a positive acceleration downwards for a ball ...

5

Every system likes to decrease its electrostatic energy. The charges on the plates are almost in stable equilibrium. The charges on the opposite plates attract them, and the charges on the same plate repel them with almost the same force. However, a capacitor has fringe fields: These may be negligible when calculating the field inside a capacitor, but ...

5

This is your circuit: The current that comes from the source, when reaches the point that must choose it's way, sees no difference between the two paths (symmetry) , so half of it flows through one way and the other part flows in the second way. It means that, $I_1=I_2$ , So the potential difference across yellow resistors is the same. It means that the ...

5

I don't understand how to compute a finite resistance for an arc that would come out as infinite in some other cases. Arc formation is a sufficiently non-stationary and nonlinear process. So, one has to use dynamic circuit theory, where the resistivity in Ohm's law is a complex number and contains both active and reactive components depending on the ...

5

The crucial fact about these idealized circuits and electric potential differences that leads to the assertion you want to justify is Wires are modeled as perfect conductors (Ohmic resistors with negligible resistance) for which there is zero potential difference between any two points. (This was edited from "perfect conductors are equipotentials.") If ...

5

We can't remove the resistor between the two points we've chosen because they're not at the same voltage. OK, let's unpack that a little. Imagine that you actually have a resistor network (any resistor network) built and want to measure its resistance with an ohmmeter. To do that, you need to choose two of the points in the network and connect the leads ...

5

The key thing is that there is NO electric field within the perfect wire. So, there is no force acting on the electron, and thus no work done on it (while it's in the perfect wire). This goes back to the definition of a perfect conductor (which the perfect wire is). Within a perfect conductor, there is no electric field. Instead, the charges (which have ...

5

A commonly used analogy is to represent the electric circuit with pipes filled with water. The electrical current is modelled by flow of water in the pipes, and the voltage is modelled by the pressure. This is known as the hydraulic analogy. Anyhow, if you have a pipe filled with water and you suddenly increase the pressure at one end, e.g. by opening a ...

5

Your problem is assuming that the charge transferred through the resistors is different. I don't know where you got that from, so I don't really know how to refute it other than by saying that since the currents must be the same, so must be the charge transfer in a given time. Edit in response to your comment: What you said is plainly not true. ...

4

Firstly, a cosinusoid is just a sine wave which has been shifted by a phase of $\pi / 2$. So the two are equivalent ways of describing a wave. One can describe a wave as a triangular wave, or a square wave or any other wave form. In fact, square waves are used as the input to all sorts of logical circuits and digital electronics. But a ...

4

Sine and cosine waves are, physically, the most common. They are definitely the best description to what comes out of a wall socket, not because we like them mathematically, but because it's what comes out. (Note sine and cosine waves are equivalent, and choice between them is merely convention) Even better, if we have some more complicated waveform - from ...

4

First, note that the light bulb is essentially just a glorified resistor. As current flows through the filament, Joule heating causes the filament to get hot and emit light. When one places a capacitor in a circuit containing a light bulb and a battery, the capacitor will initially charge up, and as this charging up is happening, there will be a nonzero ...

4

Why does this overall resistance decrease? A more elegant, sophisticated way to see why is through the notion of duality. In electric circuit theory, conductance (the reciprocal of resistance) is dual to resistance. Other dual pairs are: voltage - current series - parallel inductance - capacitance Thevenin - Norton and so on ... For example, ...

4

I'm not sure I understood all your points. I suggest you to read this beautifull paper Romer, R. H. (1982). What do “voltmeters” measure?: Faraday’s law in a multiply connected region, American Journal of Physics, 50(12), 1089. http://dx.doi.org/10.1119/1.12923 if you can find it. It's seems it's exactly what Prof. Levin is doing in his lecture. The ...

4

You're not boosting the signal; you're either acting as a reflector (capturing a bit more of it to feed to the antenna) or blocking a competing source, or perhaps a bit of both. By analogy, when you hold your hand to your ear to help you hear something, your hand is acting a reflector for sound waves to direct a little more energy into your ear. It can also ...

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