August 15, 2012

Mathematics Reloaded

Filed under: electronics — Tags: , , , Himanshu @ 12:22 pm

I got stuck in one puzzle of electronics. Was understanding resistance of electron flow, current, and voltage by little different experiments. In one of them, I had created a very basic circuit that was starting from +v end of 1.5v battery (showing 1.4v on multimeter without resistance), 470k resister and multimeter into the circuit ending at –v end of the battery. On multimeter, I noticed 0.95v.  470k resister was the cause for the drop of voltage and it was dropping voltage by 0.45v (1.4v – 0.95v = 0.45v).

I thought of using one more 470k resister expecting it to drop further 0.45v and confirm that voltage drops  to 0.5v after second 470k resister. My reasoning was: 1.4v – 0.45v – 0.45v = 0.5v. But to my surprise I was seeing 0.71v on multimeter! Multimeter wasn’t in agreement of my mathematics, but I wasn’t fully convinced with multimeter’s mathematics. All I was thinking is “Why” second resister was not dropping the voltage as equally as the first.

After further thinking and learning on V=IR, I notice very simple and basic property in numerical series in which next number is created by adding 1 to the predecessor viz. 1, 2, 3, 4, …n. And that simple and basic property is: 2 is double of 1 but 3 isn’t double of 2. Further, weight of 3 is 50% more than 2, but weight of 4 is not 50% more than 3.

Of course it’s obvious but it wasn’t so obvious to me before this experiment!

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