Learn Physics with Functional Programming

24ELECTRIC CHARGE

Electric charge is ultimately responsible for all electrical phenomena. It’s useful to be able to talk about electric charge that’s localized at a particular point in space, but it’s also useful to be able to talk about charge that’s distributed along a curve, along a surface, or throughout a volume. Such charge distributions are the subject of this short chapter.

We’ll first introduce the ideas of linear charge density, surface charge density, and volume charge density. We’ll then define a data type for charge distribution capable of representing a point charge, a line charge, a surface charge, a volume charge, or any combination ...