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Re: Electric fields and points of stability



At 12:30 PM 10/14/02, Gary Turner, you wrote:

...what if you place charges on the vertices of a
cube. Now does an equilibrium point exist? It seems that it should - at
the center of the cube - but what happens to the field lines at that
point? (There is no additional dimension to remove them).

Does this violate the (textbook) rule that field lines start and end on
charges? If it does, are there any other comparable violations?

[More food for thought - 3-D, 4-D visualizations. The potential can be
plotted as a 3-D surface for the 2-D case. Local min/max correspond
to "quasi-equilibria". I'm struggling to visualize a 4-D surface for the 3-
D potential. I usually do this as a "stack" of 3-D surfaces, but I'm just
not seeing this one. Any suggestions?]


I suggest that there is a successive argument, that beginning with a triangular
pyramid, and progressing to a sphere, that indicates that the center of a
charged enclosure progressively becomes field-free, in the nature of
a Faraday cage.
QEDbba

[quid erat demonstrandum by bold assertion]

Brian Whatcott
Altus OK Eureka!

This posting is the position of the writer, not that of SUNY-BSC, NAU or the AAPT.