Testing the TK Tar Baby

[TinselKoala]

@PC: don't worry, koan are not tests. They are just items for meditation. If you don't get one, or you miss the point, it doesn't result in a low grade for a class or anything serious like that. You just have to spend some more lifetimes on the Wheel of Karma before you attain nirvana. And that never hurt anyone -- in fact it gives even more opportunity to help, to reduce the suffering of sentients whenever possible.

[Rosemary Ainslie]

To Mark Dansie,

Dear Mark,

I've answered you here...
http://www.energy-shiftingparadigms.com/index.php/topic,2313.msg2718.html#msg2718

Kindest regards,
Rosemary

[TinselKoala]

 The pupils of the Tendai school used to study meditation before Zen entered Japan. Four of them who were intimate friends promised one another to observe seven days of silence.
On the first day all were silent. Their meditation had begun auspiciously, but when night came and the oil lamps were growing dim one of the pupils could not help exclaiming to a servant: "Fix those lamps."
The second pupil was surprised to hear the first one talk. "We are not supposed to say a word," he remarked.
"You two are stupid. Why did you talk?" asked the third.
"I am the only one who has not talked," concluded the fourth pupil.
   

[TinselKoala]

I hope nobody took that last koan personally, or that it was meant to stifle discussion ! We've made no vow.... most of us.... of silence, have we.

I'm not sure if we are ready yet to tackle capacitors under the Hydraulic Analogy (HA). It's possible that we still don't have the prerequisite ideas down quite pat. So before we "get all wet" with capacitors and the HA, I thought it would be best if I spent a little time reviewing some things we may have glossed over or skipped entirely on our way here.

We haven't talked about fields much at all. (It could be because Koalas don't really believe in fields as "real", but don't let that confuse _you_, or stop you from believing in them. After all we use them every day in many ways, so it's perfectly OK with me ... even quite necessary much of the time ... to treat them as if they were real, just as real as the wind or atmospheric pressure.) Of course I am speaking here of one of the two fields with which we are familiar, the electromagnetic field (EM), not to to be confused with electromotive force, emf. (There are four fields of force in all, perhaps 5, but we only directly experience EM and gravity.)

Here's another koan, sort of a mantram really:

Charge, motion, field : All one thing. One.

Charge is fundamental, charge is conserved, charge is quantized, the electron is the carrier of the Unit Charge of one flavor, named unauspiciously "negative" by Ben Franklin well before the electron itself was even discovered and the true direction of the charge carrier flow was known, and the proton is the carrier of the Unit Charge of the other flavor, called now "positive". Voltage arises from the mutual repulsion of like charges, current arises from the flow of charge from high voltage to lower voltage _only_, and the only charge we see flowing in our daily experience is the flow of _negative charge_, carried by electrons, in circuits made of wires.

And here's where some other "quantum" ideas enter into Quantum Electrodynamics. Who has seen a proton? Well, the "H" in H₂O designates a hydrogen nucleus... which is simply a proton, bound to an oxygen atom, which is also bound to another proton (the other H). But seen from a distance, the molecule is neutral overall, has no excess charge (although it is polarised, more later on that). This is because the number of electrons orbiting the molecule in total, balance the number of protons total, in the O nucleus plus the two Hs, and so the charge cancels out completely. From a distance.
Now... considering what we do know about atomic bonding, like the angles at which bonds form and the numbers and types of bonds that particular atoms can form.... we just have to reject the Bohr model of the atom and adopt the quantum chemistry view as a better model. The Bohr model, of course , has the nucleus at the center like a tiny sun, and the electrons in their orbits like little discrete planets, all whirling round in a tiny space, but still with the distance between the nucleus and the closest electron orbit relatively vast compared to the scale of the objects themselves.
This model no longer flies, and has been replaced by the concept of shells, orbitals and suborbitals, discrete (quantized) energy levels occupied by pairs of electrons, that can be shared in various ways between atoms engaged in bonding. There are two types of chemical bond: Ionic and covalent. These are endpoints of a continuum really; most bonds are probably somewhere in between. Ionic bonds, like in NaCl, table salt, happen when electrostatic forces are such that one atom actually fully "steals" an electron from the other, and then the two are "stuck together" by electrostatic attraction. Covalent bonds like in hexane, are situations when sub orbital energy levels actually overlap between two atoms and one or more electrons are actually fully shared between the atoms involved. Covalent bonds are much harder to break in general than ionic bonds. A third type, the resonant bond, a kind of super-covalent bond, is extremely important as well, and occurs in organic ring compounds, the prototype being benzene. But in the normal way of things, the positive charges of the nucleus are both extremely deep inside the atom and are extremely well shielded by multiple layers of negative charged electrons in the orbitals. So the only "positive" charge we see is when something happens to knock an electron out of its comfy orbital shell of a neutral atom... leaving that atom with an excess positive charge, which is really the _absence_ of an electron from where it should be.

I'm mentioning this to emphasise something I said earlier that is very important: we don't see positive charge in the macroscopic world except as the absence of electrons. Even when you pour a strong acid into water you wind up with H₃O+ ions instead of free protons.  (acids are "proton donors" and do their thing by freeing positive protons to attack anything they can).

OK... so _all current_ that we experience is the flow of _negative charges_, unless we are working with electrolysis (where positive ions carry current slowly) or proton beam accelerators.... in which case you already know this stuff and you can just test out and go home with full credit.
And this flow is carried by electrons, and happens when electrons flow from regions of excess _negative charge_ to regions of lower voltage... but which still might have excess negative charge, just perhaps not so much.

We diverted into quantum chemistry for a moment in order for me to bolster my assertion that all current we are working with is the flow of negative charge, carried by electrons, from regions of excess negative charge to regions of depleted negative charge. We call "positive" and "negative" the endpoints of that flow, or use those terms to designate the direction of the potential difference in volts. There is no "positive current" in normal electric circuits. There are regions with relatively positive and relatively negative charge... but all the mobile charge we see is made of unit negative charges carried by electrons. And here is where Ben Franklin screwed us up royally by tossing a monkey wrench into our concepts.

Today we know the facts about current flow, that it is the flow of the unit charge on the electron from regions of excess to regions of dearth. Franklin knew that something was flowing in the early electrical circuits of his time, and that this something was related to well-known electrostatic phenomena (although they weren't called that at that time). When he had to talk about the flow of this something in a consistent manner, he arbitrarily named the two species of electrostatic charge "positive" and "negative" based on the way electrostatic machines appeared to behave to him. Later on, it turned out that what he had named "negative" charge was due to the accumulation of those strange little electrons, each with their own identical inseparable unit charge. And it turned out that real current was due to the flow of these things from More Negative to Less Negative regions... in other words, exactly backwards from Ben Franklin's original arbitrary assignment of the names "positive" and "negative". One after all expects a flow to go from a positive region TO a negative one, not the other way around !
So.. so-called "conventional" current is viewed as flowing out from the positive pole of the power supply, through the circuit elements, and into the negative pole of the supply. But what is actually happening is just the reverse: negative charge, carried by electrons, is flowing from the negative pole through the circuit TO the positive pole, progressively neutralising the positive charge... which is really a lack of electrons.... at the plus pole of the battery.
There is no positive current really. It is an accident of convention, a result of Ben's great wrong guess, and by the time the electron was discovered it was too late to change the names.

Well... that was a digression away from fields. As tree-dwellers we Koalas do tend to avoid fields... but we have to cross them eventually nevertheless. More digression into prereqs to come.... thanks for your attention, and remember:

Charge, motion, field: One. One thing, one.

[Magluvin]

I prefer to use water because its very incompressibility means it can transfer energy "instantly" (really at the speed of sound) in spite of flowing slowly, just like electrons somehow can. Let's save the springy compressibility effects for components, like specifically inductors and capacitors.

Thats fine. Ive just considered different factors as to why I like the air pressure more.

I find it hard to see a water circuit being in resonance like a air pressure circuit. Hydrolic fluid, depending on the type, can have a slowly dying wave for a long time in an open container or say a lake. But in a closed circuit, no air pockets or bubbles, the resistance of the flow and the weight of the fluid dont tend to cancel each other out as a factor.

In reality, I see electric charge, and electron flow as compressible, like air or gas. Didnt Tesla say this? ;] Maybe Tesla wasnt into Zen. ;]

Lets say we have a pipe from NJ to CA filled with water and also a set of twisted cables or coax along side of it, AND a fiber optic line. Which one wil deliver output in CA first when a signal is applied in NJ? Is water compressible? Is there a delay like the wire or fiber optics? What is the delay due to? Compression? ;]

So to use hydrolics as an example for electronic flow, other things are needed in order to simulate expansion and compression, like rubber diaphragm walls in a container to simulate a capacitors function. Those added items can add to the complexity of function. Where air pressure can be just a twin container with an opening in each side for connection, and the air is what is being compressed and decompressed, like a charge on the plate of a capacitor, the plate doesnt change physical size when the charge on it is increased or decreased. No moving parts. So here I find gas to be a better candidate. Also for learning, gas is a clearer representation. Tesla. You know Big T. ;]

My experience with building and understanding speaker and subwoofer boxes gives me insight as to how sound waves work, in the box and out to the listener.
Sealed box, bass reflex(ported, vented), 4th order band pass, sixth order banpass, series tuned reflex( has 2 resonant peaks generally 30 and 60 hz for a nice sound, like the 6th order band pass but with the speaker cone facing out of the box) Isoloading(clamshelling 2 woofers in 1 box will need a box half the size of 1 to sound the same but also a better quality, at the expense of 2 woofers and more power to equal 1 in a recommended box. ;]

So I can see these bandpass, low pass and high pass circuits in electronics and in sound waves. Very similar, just sound is limited to a band of freq and electronics is also, just a wider band.

I find hydrolic to be over damped but gasses in soundwaves to be a better compromise. Without induction the inertia of a moving charge doesnt carry the same weight as water. So its another factor. 

There are many reasons. Try a pipe loop of water with a simulated capacitor made of a tank with a flexible diaphragm and try to get it to oscillate. Not much I bet. Or maybe a u shaped pipe and get it to oscillate up one side and down the other, how long will it oscillate? It will oscillate some, and we have to figure in gravity as part of that circuit.  Just too complicated. Gas is closer to doing things similar to charge and electron flow on its own, without all the props of flexing this and gravity dependent that.

Anyways, I gota read the rest of the thread after I eat to see what the next challenge is.

MaGs