Re: Knowing what you know not about what should be known

[John Clement <clement@HAL-PC.ORG>]

I think my explanation was designed to explain in a simple way to a layman,
and obviously there are examples of non inverse square laws of which the
nuclear interaction is probably one of the best known.  The simple
geometrical argument is an excellent model to help students understand some
commonly studied interactions.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

> At 11:32 PM -0500 6/20/04, John Clement wrote:
>
> > But this is explainable by the idea that the
> > field is spread out over an area so its strength decreases as the area
> > increases.
>
> I was disabused of this geometrical idea early on in my college
> career when it was pointed out to me that there are all sorts of
> interactions that do *not* follow the inverse square law. Since the
> derivation of Gauss's law explicitly depends on the geometric
> argument, it is easy to show that it only applies to those
> interactions that happen to obey the inverse square law. It's not the
> other way round.
>
> Hugh
> --
>
> Hugh Haskell
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> <mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>
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