This week was yet another partial week. Between weather and holidays, we’ve not yet had a full week of classes. Such is life I guess.
This week, we looked at the electric field of a static particle and the electric field of a fixed dipole on the dipole’s axis and on the perpendicular bisector of the axis. I really with introductory textbooks would introduce the full expression, in coordinate-free form of course, for a dipole field. I think it would go along way toward reinforcing introductory understanding of vectors. We already present a particle’s field in coordinate free form, but why not a dipole’s field? No one that I know of has taken the plunge. That includes me unfortunately. Maybe someday.
We spent all of Thursday (the course meets M-Th 10:00 a.m. -11:20 a.m.) working with GlowScript, our main programming environment this semester. I demonstrated how to define a new function, sgn() in this case. I’m rather surprised that it’s not internally defined by default, but it’s trivial to add to one’s program.
There’s not much else to say about this week. It’s all about laying a good foundation for the coming chapters. That’s important, but alas not always exciting.