scott wrote:
>> And current will flow until that charge has been exhausted. There's 
>> nothing mysterious about that. But claiming such a system has "no 
>> voltage" and yet there's current flowing through it is just silly.
> 
> As you know, a sine wave is only at zero for an infinitely short period 
> of time, so actually the voltage is never exactly zero for any finite 
> period of time.  But at the instant it is zero, it is normal to have a 
> non-zero current when dealing with capacitors and resistors.

Well OK, but you can make the voltage arbitrarily small while making the 
current arbitrarily large. Just by asking nicely.

In my experience - and hell, what would I know about reality? - things 
don't just move of their own accord. There must be a *force* driving 
them. Otherwise we'd all by driving perpetual motion machines to work by 
now...

> Someone posted this here a while ago:
> 
> http://www.falstad.com/circuit/
> 
> The default circuit that opens is exactly the point here.  See how the 
> green and yellow lines on the scopes at the bottom are out of phase?  
> Green = voltage, yellow = current.

I've played with this thing before. Never been able to make much sense 
out of it though - too much happening at once to really take it all 
in... That guy does a lot of really cool physics stuff though. (I'm 
currently addicted to the wave tank...)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message