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 what is technically the second meeting of my Electromagnetic Theory class, I discussed with them the electric field on a lone particle from a ring of charge, which is the second topic, since I knew the students were going to submit their assignment on the line of charge.

The answers to that I will present to them next meeting. I started out with the simplest case with is symmetrical in two dimensions, and which is the topic that is given in their introduction to electricity and magnetism class and book. This time though, I gave them the integral calculus origins of the equation we used in that lecture.

It was a good thing that from my warning there was at least one student who brought their book from that time, although no one showed up with their table of integrals, so I couldn’t continue the lecture if it was all going to be solutions based on my analysis. So we stopped the second solution (where the charged particle is on the same plane as the ring – only symmetrical in one dimension therefore) before getting rid of the integral. Since the next scenarios were based on the same principle (having the same exponent in the denominator of three-halves) we stopped those discussions there also.

The last two cases were the most interesting, because they also had to recall their three-dimensional vectors from their intermediate mechanics subject. I think this is the first time that the students are seeing the fruits of all their previous lessons applied combined.

The third was with the lone particle above the ring and outside its circumference. The fourth one had the particle above the ring and along the circumference.

What I didn’t give them, but which I will reserve for the exam, is when the particle is above the ring and between the circumference and the axis.

A certain student attended, for the first time, and since he wasn’t listening on the lecture again but concentrating on copying the notes, he thought the assignment was the same as the exercise, which he didn’t submit since he apparently could not answer it. No exercise notebook either.

Session 1479 hasn’t changed. Class dismissed.