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[Phys-L] Re: Electric Field?



I'm not too sure of what John writes below. I have written a program (part
of the E&M Animated Chalkboard package) to map electric field lines in 2
dimensions. The way it works is that I place a test charge near one of the
charges that makes up the charge distribution. I then calculate the force
on the test charge due to all charges in the distribution, the acceleration,
the velocity, and the new position taking a very small time interval. I
move the test charge to that position plotting the path to get there and
then repeat until the charge either gets far off the visible screen or ends
up at a second charge. This method produces the field line patterns we all
know.

?? I'm confused. The procedure you describe above will produce the
trajectory of the test charge, not the field lines. That's what I
did using a simple spreadsheet that cut the development time to about
ten minutes.

Producing the field line patterns is a much simpler operation that
does not require calculating accelerations and integrating them twice
to get the new velocities and positions.

--
John "Slo" Mallinckrodt

Professor of Physics, Cal Poly Pomona
<http://www.csupomona.edu/~ajm>

and

Lead Guitarist, Out-Laws of Physics
<http://www.csupomona.edu/~hsleff/OoPs.html>
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