- #1
Sven Andersson
- 38
- 0
I have asked this question before on various fora, but I never got a really satisfactory answer. Perhaps physicists simply don't know...
Anyway I'm asking again; an electric field emanating from, say a small pointed metal electrode, is for many practical purposes a continuous field that is "infinitely differentiable". To me this means that if you are at a distance of e.g. 3 cm from the electrode and then move 10 Å further from the electrode the field strength will diminish exactly in proportion to the extra distance. However I have an intuitive feeling that this is not really true; that there are really "steps" in the field. You move 5 Å and nothing happens to the field strength and then at 12 Å the field changes abruptly by an integer multiple of something.
So am I right or wrong? What are you comments? Is my intuition correct about quantization of fields? Is it possible to put numbers on this? Include Planck's constant in some formula?
S.A.
Anyway I'm asking again; an electric field emanating from, say a small pointed metal electrode, is for many practical purposes a continuous field that is "infinitely differentiable". To me this means that if you are at a distance of e.g. 3 cm from the electrode and then move 10 Å further from the electrode the field strength will diminish exactly in proportion to the extra distance. However I have an intuitive feeling that this is not really true; that there are really "steps" in the field. You move 5 Å and nothing happens to the field strength and then at 12 Å the field changes abruptly by an integer multiple of something.
So am I right or wrong? What are you comments? Is my intuition correct about quantization of fields? Is it possible to put numbers on this? Include Planck's constant in some formula?
S.A.