A lot of my friends know that I lived in Russia at the end of the last century. In reality the job I had there was an easy gig, so I had lots of time on my hands. One day shortly after I had finished the manuscript for my book, Juice, I started thinking about E-Play--particularly the commonly held belief (amongst some) of "...no electrical play above the waste." From my electrical engineering background, I knew that was a highly restrictive view not really within the bounds of how an electric current acts within a 3-dimensional conductor. Current kinda takes a more or less straight path from the source to the sink, but if the carriers--say the electrons--can't follow in an end-to-end, 'conga-line' fashion, they'll try to get there by going to the 'next lane over' (or above, below, whatever). In other words current tends to 'spread out' from the general straight path. (If you want to persue this further, may I suggest looking at the subject of solid state physical properties. EE's have to.) "But," I asked myself, "how can I show that?"
Then I remembered my electrical engineering student days. We did experiments in lab to study electric fields using a material called "Toledus Paper." This is an electrically conductive paper. By placing electrodes at different places on the paper, charging them with a battery, and then taking voltage measurements at different points on the paper. In this way, a map could be drawen showing the fields. It's all quite interesting experiment, but dull to conduct. (It's amazing what a thing like "getting a grade" will inspire.)
But, alas, no Toledus Paper did I have. "How," I asked myself, "could I duplicate this experiment and study different field paths resulting from different electrode placements." "Ah, how about a conductive liquid? ...like salt water?" This would also have the advantage that other people could also duplicate the same experiment and satisfy their own curiosity.
And so on with the experiment. I used a plastic food container, salt water, nails, clothespins, and batteries. I used an ordinary VOM and a ruled piece of paper to do the measurments. (I've always appreciated that some of the resourcefulness of the Russian people rubbed off on me.) The only thing left was performing the experiment, and I had lots of time to do that.
So much for the easy part. How the hell do I reduce all this raw data? Fortunately I owned a computer in Russia, and I was fluent in Excel. As a student I had been trained in relaxation reduction techniques--a mathematical numerical technique taking advantage of a computer to reduce and smooth-out spacially arranged data. And Excel made it so easy. (I wish I had had it in my student days. It would have saved me hours of Fortran programming.) And I had also had a course or two in HTML, so being able to do a web page of the results was easy too.
It was hard work, but I had lots of spare time and enthusiasm in the project. The rest was--as they say--history. (Actually it's at my website if you want to see it all laid out.)
Cao-4-Now
Unc'
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