Recent content by abcdcba

The sign error was carelessness on my part only. And I get what you are saying about different materials, etc., but am still thrown off in my understanding of the current. It has to be constant throughout the circuit or else we would be violating conservation of charge, or charge would be...

Thanks for these replies! rigetFrog, if I think of it that way, then it does make sense. UltrafastPED, that helps too. What confuses me is this (and I couldn't figure out the answer from your pdf):1. Electrons drift through the wire from the battery to the resistor at velocity vd. They are in...

I guess I am asking *why* that is the case. What is physically happening, in this idealized process? (In the wires and in the resistor--I don't really care how the emf is generated).

I can do circuit problems, but conceptually I cannot figure out what is going on from a basic physics perspective, with respect to the following: Say you have a circuit with a battery (emf = V) and a resistor (resistance = R). Then, electrons on one side of the resistor are in a constant...