Today was Wednesday (aka Hump Day) in Honors Physics and what a great one it was. As I strolled into the room with about fifteen seconds to spare as normal, I heard an abundance of conversation around the room. As I listened closer, I was able to hear people express their relief of being done with the monsterously long lab that we had to endure of the past two weeks. Although every was expecting a day of relaxtion, there is always more physics to be learned. Today we learned about Ohm's Law and Equivalent Resistance, which explains mathematically what we just learned through our labs. We leanred a new equation, V=iR where V is velocity, i is current (why?) and R is resistance. We also learned later that V is in volts, i is in ampheres (again, no sense) and R is in ohms, represented by a capital omega symbol. We also learned in the next section that the resistance of the single resistor that wouldm produce the same effect as that produced by the network is equivalent resistance. (Pstttt, here is the good part) But, the equations for equivalent resistance depend on if the network is in series or in parallel. If it is in series, you merely sum up all the resistors. However, if it is in a parallel network, you have to add the reciprocals of each resistor. We then worked through the rest of our examples on our example sheet and got a double-sided worksheet for homeowrk. Windmills are due on Friday and we have a quiz tomorrow over Sections 3 and 4 in the lab and our notes that we took today.
QOD: The mathematical equation for a series network is just R1 +R2 + R3 = Req, therefore stating that as resistors are added, the overall resistance increases. But, the mathematical equation for parallel networks is 1/R1 + 1/R2 +1/R3 = 1/Req which proves a theory stated earlier in our labs that the more resistors are added to a paralled circuit, the less resistance the overall circuit has.
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