Physics education research, electronic materials, and the musings of Christopher Moore, Ph.D.
Physics education research, electronic materials, and the musings of Christopher Moore, Ph.D.
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Take a spherical conductor and pass in through a plane (a table if you like) at constant speed. What is the time behavior of the current through the plane? Another words does it increase and then decrease like a sinusoidal dependence or is it something else? The answer might surprise you!
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Bonus points for deriving the time behavior...
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Ok... no one wants to take a stab at it huh? Here's the answer - the current is constant as it passes through the plane. Now can any tell me why? This seems to be contradictory as the cross sectional radius increases and then decreases as it passes though, so one would "intuitively" come up with a time varying current. Think about this...
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Ok. Another hint - if you take a sphere and slice it laterally (like lines of latitude on a globe) with a constant thicknes, what is the relationship amongst the surface areas for these slices? Does it increase near the middle of the sphere and is at less at the poles? That's I gigantic hint.
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