Re: Oh, a warning about playing with glass & charge....

[Tim May <tcmay@got.net>]

At 1:38 PM -0800 11/21/98, Jim Choate wrote:
>If you do decide to play with charges stored on glass plates wear eye
>protection because every once in a while the mechanical stress is more than
>the glass can take and it will shatter.
>

And when you do your "...and then take away one of the copper plates"
experiment, you'll find that force is needed. Force times distance is
energy. The energy to pull one of the plates away equals the 0.5CV^2 energy
no longer stored in the capacitor.

The energy stored is not stored either on the plate or on the insulator. It
is in the electric field.

A free-standing single conductor can of course store a charge. And can of
course have an electric field.

Frankly, Jim, you no doubt have a lot of practical experience building
Tesla coils, Van de Graf generators, whatever.

But you also have what can only be described as "crankish" notions about
how electromagnetism works (pace last week's discussion of charges inside
conductors, a la Gauss), about prime numbers, and so on.

--Tim May

"I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, just the way the President did."
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