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.

In the second meeting of my Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism lecture class for the seventh week of the first term, we started on Chapter 28.

This is after beginning and finishing with Chapter 27, Gauss' Law, the last meeting.

The new chapter is about potential, which I told them is where we first get to discuss the quantities that they already know about from the lab.

Grabbing from something already in their lessons from the previous term, potential energy, I related this to work, then force multiplied by displacement.

And since, when I announced about the Innovation Week in their Intermediate Mechanics One class I know that they had already taken up the dot product, I brought it up, eliciting groans from the students.

I guess in their other class the concept is so alien and incomprehensible.

From work I introduced potential difference, which is the same as voltage, giving them a “new” unit, volt, which I warned them would be their exercise.

Same with electron volt, a unit of work like joule, for which I gave the conversion.

Then I gave the expression for the potential due to one charge, and for a system of charges, which I just said is about addition of vectors again.

I told them we would take up the second half of the chapter, on continuous charge distributions, of course, so as not to overwhelm them.

Then I had two examples on the basic concepts, the second example of which we didn't finish since it was already eating into the time for the exercise. I just told them to finish the computation using the quadratic formula.

Session 1205 doesn't like it when lessons from different classes cross over. Class dismissed.