Blog-style Self-paced study. I'm trying to retain what I'm reading in the textbook, while building up an intuition and understanding for the overlap between math, physics, and chemistry.

(I'm also wanting to start trying to fix my study habits, maybe this could help a person or two)

3/10/22

The interactions between electric charges are known as electrostatics. 

Electric charges describe a characteristic of particles that have an accompanying field, electric field, which can in turn cause another particle in the vicinity to accelerate and through Newton's second Law cause a force, electric force. 

So why is this charge characteristic, field, and force defined as electric?

Besides the etymology coming from the ancient Greeks' discovery of some non-physical attraction between a rubbed piece of amber and wool, what makes an electric charge, electric?

sideNote: I actually think the only thing that makes it "electric" is the etymology lol.

So a simple explanation of charge would go something like this:

Object₁ and object₂ are being rubbed against each other. When they are pulled apart, they pull towards each other and stick together; however, object₁ and object₂ aren't particular sticky, and there doesn't appear to be any physical characteristic that makes object₁ and object₂ stick.  

So why are object 1 and 2 attracted to each other? Rather than having a visible force like tension from a string, or friction from a surface, there appears to be some non-visible force pulling the two objects together.  

Suppose object₁ and object₂ are cut in half in two identical pieces. 

Now there are 4 objects:

object_1,1; object_1,2 experience the same "stickiness" to  object_2,1; object_2,2 that object₁ had experienced towards object_{2,2 .}

object_1,1 sticks to object_2,1 or object_2,2  but no matter hard they're pushed together object_1,1 and object_1,2 do not stick. In fact, they push away from each other.

sideNote: this is a late night for me, and I'm tired but I'm proud with how much I've done today. I'll finish editing this blog and concluding the chapter tomorrow.  I would ideally like to catch up to chapter 27 by the end of spring break, but realistically I will probably only get up to chapter 24. I have a feeling that Chapter 22, particularly Electric Flux, is going to keep me busy for a few days.  I still don't understand the integrals along a closed line, and my calc is really rusty, but regardless it'll be a fun experience revisiting that-- maybe I can start a calculus study blog too. This concludes my night. gn :)

3/11

So the assumption can be made that object₁ experiences repulsion towards itself, but experiences attraction toward object₂ ; object₂  also experiences repulsion towards itself but attraction towards object₁ . 

The objects have opposite charges. Essentially we assign the objects a charge of either positive or negative. for this example, this is arbitrary, considering we don't know the chemical make up of the objects.

sideNote: i'm getting impatient with dragging out this same example, it's such a pain to type.