5 posts tagged “electricity”
I was partly fascinated and partly disgusted by this book. Fascinated because the author discusses my most cherished subject. Disgusted that his goal of telling the story of electricity comes second to cultural sophistication and appearing intelligent to those Americans who are similarly socially conscious. He is constantly proposing loose metaphors between electricity and every thing else, not for the purpose of clarifying, since his metaphors do more to obscure the complexity of the grid than anything else. The electron is a slave, POOF, now it's a cow, BANG, a fish, Zap, the salvation of mankind. The whole book reads like a magician displaying his fantastical wares to a group of ignorant onlookers. For example, he often reverts back to a "gods of electricity" theme. Except his gods aren't Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, Insull, or any of their counterparts in business today. These gods he refers to are innate to the grid because of its complexity and they strike whenever the lowly operators of the grid get too comfortable. I only was able to choke down his endless stream of bullshit, with the rare diamond interspersed, under the surety that he's just regurgitating for mass appeal and doesn't actually have any authority. The only useful parts of this book are the first couple chapters that cover history and the bibliography.
The Grid has inbuilt redundancy. If one generator or cable goes bad, a second or a third should automatically shoulder the extra burden. But in an elaborately complex system - one made from lots of swiftly interacting components - it doesn't always work that way. The linemen most particularly concerned with the continuity of service, the ones who wear hard hats and drive those tool-crammed vans, do daily combat with a variety of maladies: cracking insulation, expanding joints between fitted parts, frayed materials, settling ground, tarnished contacts, leaking water. All of these unwanted departures from the norm can lead to criticality. The system can work itself into a fragile condition in which even a tiny problem can quickly escalate into a large problem. The grid is not inert. It does things and things are done to it
Pleased, she sighed, "A raging storm held captive in filaments stretched over miles. Occasionally, it will break a chain, but will be made to heel."
My name is Amanda Carlson. I'm 21 in Lafayette, IN and I'm not studying to be a nurse. :-)
I'm trying to get into Purdue's Applied Physics or Electrical Engineering program. The point of which is that I'm trying to find a career in the energy/electrical industry. I'm not really sure yet where I'll go, but I have a few ideas. I'm looking for a sort of managerial position between operations and sales where I can oversee the production of energy, make it more efficient, and sell it to the grid. So, right now I'm really interested in IPPs [Independent Power Producers], who basically just make, or gather, the electricity and sell it off to big name clients. I like it because they run without the costly and heavily regulated grid infrastructure that say Duke would need to supply electricity to individual consumers. Anyway, as uncertain as my career is right now, I am certain that being able to communicate effectively between technicians, other supervisors, and buyers will be essential. I'll have to write up and/or evaluate safety and production reports, create policy memos, instruct in proper procedures, solicit buyers, and answer the questions of clients. And I'm sure I'm only touching on all the many numerous ways I'll need communicate with other people in a professional capacity, so I think I can get a lot from this course.
I wasn't really sure what to expect from this course, and I'm pleasantly surprised. This course is really about how useful communication is, and so what really stood out was the emphasis on clarity. Clarity in your writing is crucial because, in this sense, the goal is to accurately convey an idea and you can only accomplish that by being clear. But in itself being clear isn't enough, because there are many ways to say the same thing. To figure out the right way to say it, you really need to bear in mind to whom you're saying it. Otherwise, you might think you're being as obvious as possible when really you're talking past your audience. Also, you can do simple things to gain the audience's confidence in your authority like using proper spelling, fact-checking, and typing on the company letter-head with formatting that's easy on the eyes.
While taking physics classes I learn quite a few derivations and formulas, but curiously little in the big-picture-conceptual sense . Lately I've been trying to answer this basic question: what are electric/magnetic fields, what in the actual world does this concept represent? This is my current understanding.
Matter interacts with other matter in various ways. One way in which it does so is by charge, charge being an attribute of matter analogous to mass. There are two types of charge which produce opposite effects. They are therefore said to be 'opposite' charges and assigned the arbitrary value of positive and negative. Matter that interacts by virtue of its charge is said to do so electrically, and when charged matter is moving it also interacts magnetically.
In these interactions the charged matter applies equal and opposite force on one another. An electric field is a map of predictions of how this force will be applied to any other charge given a certain degree of charge of a particle; a magnetic field is this set of predictions for moving particles.
Particles only interact magnetically when all the concerned particles have a magnetic field, ie. are charged and moving. One particle will not act magnetically while the another acts electrically, or not at all, or in any other manner. To illustrate this point, consider a static charged particle and a passing charged particle. The static particle has an electric field, the passing particle has both an electric field and a magnetic field. The particles will interact equal and oppositely depending upon charge (attraction or repulsion), causing the static particle to move (thus a magnetic field) and the passing particle to shift in it's motion. They will then begin to act magnetically.
An important thing to note is that since the magnetic interaction of particles is dependant on their velocities, and velocity is relative to the reference frame of observation, magnetic fields are relative. This means that how one observes the interaction is dependent upon the context in which one views it; it does not look the same from every point of view.
I have been trying to figure out what exactly is meant by the term electric field. This is what I think so far:
A net/matrix of predictions over distance of the force exerted on a hypothetical particle, P2, by a particle, P1.
This is how my textbook (Matter and Interactions v.2 e.1.5 by Chabay) defines an electric field: Force2 (vector) = charge2 * electric field1 (vector)
Any thoughts; what is an electric field?
Comments Posted to Original Blog
- Amanda Carlson said...
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There's only one more thing I don't quite like about my definition. It assumes that charges as such interact, when in fact the matter is interacting by virtue of it's attribute charge. It also, isn't completely clear in it's genus
So, the revised definition is:
A map of predictions depicting how an object of any charge will interact with an object of a given charge.
~Amanda
I've refined and clarified my definition of an electric field:
A map predicting how any charge will interact with a given charge.~Amanda
Monday, February 20, 2006 2:11:00 AM