- #1
joshjohns
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Four charges are placed at the vertices of a square, centered at the origin, as shown in the diagram. If each side of the square has a length of 0.224 m, what is the strength and direction of the net electric field at the origin? Express your answer in terms of the charge magnitude q.
e = kq/r^2
a^2+b^2=c^2
addition of vectors
also the unit circle
x=rcos
y=rsin
3. attempt at a solution
seperated them since they were all on a 45 degree angles into pi/4, 3pi/4, 5pi/4, 7pi/4
I then found each of the lentghs from the origins to be the sqrt of 2(.112^2 ) from the pythagorean theorem which gave me a radius of .158391919, I then plugged that into the equation for e=kq/r^2 which gave me the magnitude 3.58338648*10^11 I then plugged that into the rcos and r sin formulas for each answer and got my final answer to be (0c, 0c) which of course is in a direction of 0. This was wrong, I know I must be something really simple that I am missing. could some one please help me?
Homework Equations
e = kq/r^2
a^2+b^2=c^2
addition of vectors
also the unit circle
x=rcos
y=rsin
3. attempt at a solution
seperated them since they were all on a 45 degree angles into pi/4, 3pi/4, 5pi/4, 7pi/4
I then found each of the lentghs from the origins to be the sqrt of 2(.112^2 ) from the pythagorean theorem which gave me a radius of .158391919, I then plugged that into the equation for e=kq/r^2 which gave me the magnitude 3.58338648*10^11 I then plugged that into the rcos and r sin formulas for each answer and got my final answer to be (0c, 0c) which of course is in a direction of 0. This was wrong, I know I must be something really simple that I am missing. could some one please help me?