PHYS4B — Electricity and Magnetism

The concepts covered in the second semester of the Physics for Scientists and Engineers series are much more abstract than those in the first semester.  Gravity and momentum have relatable meanings in that their effects are observed in day to day life.  However, the behavior of an electron within an electric field is, comparatively, an altogether elsewhere phenomenon.  One particularly fitting example of this abstractedness is voltage.  What is voltage?  Everybody is familiar with the word and it is used fairly regularly, but most people don’t have a clue what it really means.  And they shouldn’t because it is such a robust and simultaneously peculiar idea.  Ask yourself if you have ever tried to explain it?  Similarly, has anyone ever tried to explain it to you?  You can go look it up in the dictionary if you want, but that’s not going to do any good.  If you are curious and attempt to do some quick research on it you will find that you end up with at least ten questions for every partial answer you uncover.  Continuing these efforts will, in the short term, only result in frustration and add heft to your original question.  One has to take this course in order to begin constructing a fundamental notion of voltage.  After much time and energy the idea starts to set in, and eventually it is realized that voltage is something that simply cannot be given a convenient or abbreviated explanation.

Electricity and Magnetism provides a healthy dose of circuits and devices and so voltage comes up constantly throughout, along with current, power, resistance/conductance and other terms that are a part of your common, everyday electricity lingo.  Some rather intense mathematical models are also introduced to describe and predict physical interactions within the realm of the electric and magnetic, such as calculating the flux of a field through an object or surface.  The material was fascinating, although it was at times somewhat superficial (this was necessary to keep it from becoming unwieldy).  My teacher commented a couple of times that this class was like kindergarten, and not in a disparaging way–as soon as I heard this I understood what she meant.

Finding success in this course was very important for me because I was receiving my first real taste of what was to be the other half of my Electrical Engineering and Computer Science major (or the second half of my double major, or whatever the hell is going on there).  Fortunately I performed very consistently and at the highest level throughout, which I sorely needed after my many difficulties in Mechanics.  Not only had I reestablished my ability to feel confident in the subject of Physics, but nearly everything I had been struggling with throughout the first semester completely locked into place.  At the conclusion of this class I was able to “get” Physics, which is kind of a neat thing to be able to say.  However, it is still a little concerning to me that I was having such a hard time with the subject only a few months earlier.  Whenever it comes up, I feel obligated to communicate to others that my initial experience with the subject, which should have been positive, was taking me down a disorienting, frustrating and educationally unhealthy path.

Exams

– Forthcoming