Electricity

Electric forces and electric energy play critical roles in the functioning of biological systems at the cellular level. Electric forces are responsible for how molecules interact, attracting and repelling, and electric potentials are the way nervous systems send signals through the body.

In some classes that use these materials, electric forces are studied with forces of all kinds and electric energy is studied in the context of energy. If you have already studies those sections, it still might be useful to review them so they are included at the beginning of the chapter's table of contents below.

To get an overview of the chapter, and to understand the motivation for our approach, look at the page:

• Overview: Electricity

Here's the full Table of Contents of the chapter. The notation "(EX)" means that there is a(t least one) worked example attached to that page. The notation "{WO}" means there is an activity (a Workout) attached to that page, usually one that involves working with a simulation.

• Electric forces
  • Charge and the structure of matter
  • Polarization (WO)
  • Coulomb's law (WO)
    • Coulomb's law -- vector character (EX)
    • Reading the content in Coulomb's law
  • The Electric field  (WO)
    
    • Making sense of a vector field
    • Motivating simple electric models
      • A simple electric model: A line of charge
        • The line charge integral
      • A simple electric model: A sheet of charge
        • The sheet of charge integral (technical)
      • A simple electric model: A spherical shell of charge
• Electric potential energy (EX)
• The electric potential
• Motivating Capacitance
  • Two parallel sheets of charge
  • The capacitor (WO, EX)
    • The dielectric constant
  • The energy stored in a capacitor
• Electric fields in matter
• Electrical interactions in ionic solutions
  • Debye length
  • The Nernst potential (WO)
• Electric currents
  • Quantifying electric current
  • Resistive electric flow -- Ohm's law
  • Ways to think about current -- a toolbox of models
  • Kirchhoff's principles (WO, EX)
• Electrical energy and power