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5: Chapter 5

Last updated

Jun 23, 2019
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- 4.1: Electric Dipoles
- 5.1: Calculating Electric Fields of Charge Distributions

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5.1: Calculating Electric Fields of Charge Distributions
The charge distributions we have seen so far have been discrete: made up of individual point particles. This is in contrast with a continuous charge distribution, which has at least one nonzero dimension. If a charge distribution is continuous rather than discrete, we can generalize the definition of the electric field. We simply divide the charge into infinitesimal pieces and treat each piece as a point charge.

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