Part 1 Review
Important Concepts
That was a lot of concepts to take in at once, but it should provide a solid foundation to aid in understanding how electronic circuits work. As a quick review:
- Positive and negative charges are arbitrarily named characteristics to describe the attractive and repulsive behavior of subatomic particles such as protons and electrons.
- Atoms get their net "charge" as ions; when there is an imbalance between the number of positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons.
- Materials that electrons move freely between atoms are electrically conductive.
- Because of historic reasons, circuits are described with the concept of hole-flow, rather than electron flow, which states that charge carriers flow from positive to negative.
- Electrons flow rather slowly, but their effect travels at the speed of light as an electromagnetic wave.
- Electromagnetism is a three-dimensional attraction and repulsion force that arises from the angular momentum of electrons; a strong magnetic field can be generated from current going through a coiled wire.
- A current can be induced in a wire when it passes through a magnetic field.