On the second day of class, our professor began teaching us about electric fields. An electric field is a physical force field. He drew an electric field as a bunch of vectors radiating from the center of the field, where there was a positively charged particle. As the vectors got further away from the center, they got shorter. The vectors represented other positively charged particles. Positively charged particles repel each other, so the vectors were proportional to how much the particles were repelled. He told us we could think of electrical fields as mountains, with the center as the top. The closer the particle is to the center, the higher it is on the mountain, and the more potential energy it has. Voltage is the length of these vectors. It is the electric potential difference between two points, and is measured in volts. It is also the energy potential per unit of charge, or the potential energy with respect to ground. All the same thing said different ways.
Current is the flow of electrical charge through something conductive, like wire. Current is measured in amps.
We also played around with some mysterious machines called oscilloscopes. Oscilloscopes are used to measure voltage and electrical signals. When we had nothing touching our oscilloscope, it displayed 60 hz. That is because in America 60 hz is the utility frequency, the frequency of oscillations of electrical current transmitted from the power plants.
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