Electrostatics

C, E and F Blocks began their long journey through electricity today with an introduction to electrostatics. The property of charge was described, as were the forces it generated. We looked at Millikan's oil-drop experiment and how it demonstrated that charge was a quantized value and linked that to the law of conservation of charge. Time was also taken to describe three methods of charging (friction, conduction and induction) and we'll see some examples of those methods as we move through the chapter. On Monday, we hit the topic of electric force right in the nose and spend time with Coulomb's Law. B Block worked on a lab that looked at electric discharge. Coulomb's law was used to determine the size of charges on two spheres and how basic ideas of force vectors could be used to work problems involving electric force. Folks had an interesting time working with that lab and we'll go over the results on Monday, when begin our discussion of electrostatics.