Talk:Electronics/Voltage, Current, and Power

This section should cover charge, voltage, and current at the least. Will also probably include some items from Electronics Overview (which is really more of a glossary, and overlaps with the definitions in the appendix.)

Charge
I moved everything about charge over to a new chapter called Electronics/Charge and Coulomb's Law. Electric field, an introductory section on Energy, Electric potential energy, Electric potential, Voltage, Current, and Power are discussed in this chapter, most of which I wrote. I plan to change the title of this chapter to Electronics/Voltage, Current, and Power. "Charge and Coulomb's Law" would be the first chapter and this chapter would be the second chapter. The "Electric Field" section could stay here or be moved to the end of the "Charge and Coulomb's Law" chapter, whatever it would take to even the length of the first two chapters out.

H Padleckas 11:33, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Electric Field
Interesting that H Padleckas added the "Electric Field" section here to Electronics/Basic_Concepts (on 30 Jun 2004), only 2 days after I (on 28 Jun 2004) added the "Electric Field" section to GCSE Science/Current, voltage resistance and Ohm's law.

Great minds think alike, eh ?

On any other wiki, I would try to merge the best parts of both explanations into one single explanation. Hopefully the merged explanations is better than either original.

On the other hand, instead of repeating the same paragraph over and over, some teachers like to have several very different-sounding explanations of the same thing -- some students will "get" the first explanation right off, and repeating it again won't help the other students.

Should I merge these E field descriptions ?

Then the index of several different wikibooks could link to one merged explanation. That would be similar to the way that so many books dealing with computers re-print the same ASCII table.

-- DavidCary 14:55, 3 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Reply to DavidCary remark on two different sections on electric field
I, H Padleckas, have read your relatively new section on Electric Field in "Current, ....(GSCE science)." The sentence stating:

The "electric field" indicates how much force (in Newtons), and in what direction, is required to hold that particle in place, divided by the charge of that particle.

seemed a little awkward because it was not clear that "is required" is the verb for the subject "force." Therefore, I made a slight modification to make it sound a little better. I also modified the sentence about [if the particle just "sits" there, there is no electric field in that location]. A particle could "sit" there because some opposing reactive force(s) could balance out the electric force, even though the electric field is not zero.

The "Electronics" book is different from the GSCE book. The GSCE book is a fairly simple book for 14-16 year olds, students in first couple years of high school without a strong mathematics background. The simple explanation on Electric Field there is adequate for them. The "Electronics" book, however, is intended to be somewhat more advanced and comprehensive with a higher degree of math ability assumed, although the use of calculus, I anticipate, will be kept to a minimum. I think it is intended for a college student's or adult's electrical course, or at least an upper level high school electronics (or maybe physics) course. I have, nevertheless, tried to keep unnecessarily complicated theory out of the book, such as electric field equations derived from Coulomb's Law, especially on the grounds that many electrical engineers do not use such equations in practice. I do not intend to dwell on electric field further in the "Electronics" book.

My recommendation is to keep both these discussions on electric field separate the way they are in their respective books. H Padleckas 03:38, 4 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Definitions
Instead of linking to an article like volt, we should link to the definitions page, like volt. Unfortunately, getting it to go right to the appropriate definition will require us to turn all the definition tags into subsection tags, like this: volt. Anyone know of a better way? - Omegatron 14:56, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)