Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

For the second meeting of my Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism class for the first week of the first term, I gave the standard "storytelling" part of the lecture, which I later admitted I modelled after the works of the scientist in the field, Michael Faraday, whose laboratory notebooks contained not a single equation.

In the discussion, I also said that it was James Clerk Maxwell who gave mathematical form to Faraday's descriptions.

After that I told the students that we were going from the Faraday part of the topic to the Maxwell part, which was the first equation I gave them, Coulomb's law.

For this I also started with two particles in one dimension, the easiest scenario to study for the electrostatic forces between two charged particles in a straight line.

During this time, I also kept asking one of the students sitting in front, who brought a copy of the textbook with him, to keep reciting. I also joked that because of this he will probably leave his book at home for the succeeding meetings.

The next simplest scenario I gave them was of three particles in a straight line, where only the distances from the ends to the middle were given. I was hoping that they would intuit that to get the forces for the particles at the ends, the distances given would have to be added before plugged in the equation.

They also had to determine the direction of the forces based on the principle that like charges repel and opposite charges attract.

Finally they had to sum up the forces acting on each particle from the other two, to find out the resultant force on it. This they had to compute for each of the three particles.

Session 1137 repels. Class Dismissed.