Week of January 14th

With our section of physics II's first homework not due until this Sunday night, It came as no surprise to me that nobody showed up for my Tuesday office hours. After a tough lecture on Wednesday about the arbitration of a second charged particle in Coulomb's law, otherwise known as the electric field, I was eager to discus this abstract concept with students in my Thursday hours. One student came with a question along the lines of "What does all of the calculus mean in the derivation of a continuous system?".  To try and further their understanding we ran through a quick derivation of the E field sourced by a uniformly charged ring.  I focused on explaining how "chopping" the system up into many differential pieces of charge can be helpful in setting up an integral that when evaluated is the solution to the problem. The example we worked through also had some neat symmetry that made the problem easier by canceling both the y and z components of the E field. At the end of the session we related this method back to the assigned sapling homework and other more general systems.