Ted's Polish-Mexican Page

I'm one of those "non-traditional" students. That's easier than saying I was too lazy to graduate college the first time around.

I'm taking Physics 216, Electricity and Magnetism. It's been fascinating so far. Physics 210, as cool as it was, was based on concepts that were pretty firmly in place by the 1700s. This stuff, however, was mostly found out in the 19th Century.

Some of it more recent. The instructor talked about how Coloumb's Law says nothing about how electrical forces are actually transmitted. Next thing you know, he hits the projector and throws up a picture of Albert Einstein.

Then he described the "electric field." Apparently, all objects that have a charge have an electric field. Okay, easy enough. This field cannot be directly percieved through our normal senses. Yeah, I can deal with that. This field exists and can act even when there are no particles between the charged particle and the particle it is acting on. Eh?

It also has the potential to act on all objects, no matter how distant. But we were told that that will not make calculations a mess.

So, is this thing for real? Evidently, from what the instructor said, more real than matter itself. Geez. Being made of matter, I think I should be insulted. This thing exists even though there is nothing there. This whole concept is barely a eighty years old and was suggested by a guy whose thought process is still unfathomable. I'm supposed to grasp this?

We expect mechanical forces to be transmitted through contact. Clint Dempsey moves the ball by contacting it with his foot, for example. When Sir Isaac Newton saw a conflict between this and the way gravity worked (also something that generates a field), he basically said, "hey, I'm not even going there, just check out the formulae." Of course, he said it in Latin so he sounded very smart.

Then he said not to think about it too much, and gave us the units that we use to measure this field. But if there is nothing there...never mind.

This heavy concept is being thrown at us, and it is the second day of class.


Note to all of you astrology goons out there: this is barely proof of it. The strength is inversely proportional to distance, so far off objects don't generate a lot of force. The field generated by, say, the Al-Giedi (the brightest star in Capricornus, my "sign"), 100 light years away, is negligible compared to the field generated by my car radio, which isn't even working.


Hasta la proxima. Do zobaczenia.