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The Good, The Bad, and the Physics of Gauss’s Law
I both love and hate Gauss’s Law. But before we get into my relationship with a physics equation, let me show you my original motivation for this post. I see this t-shirt sometimes with a Guass’s Law joke. It looks something like this.
The caption for this t-shirt says “No Flux Given”. I think there’s a couple of problems with this t-shirt, but it’s still fairly funny. I’m going to explain the error, but I need to first go over some stuff — in particular: electric flux and Gauss’s Law.
What the Flux?
There are a bunch of great jokes that use “flux”. But what is flux? What about a flux capacitor that makes time travel possible?
No, I don’t actually know anything about flux capacitors — but it’s a cool sounding name.
Even though we don’t have a flux capacitor, you can have all sorts of different kinds of flux. It’s not just electric flux. Let’s start with something that’s easier to visualize. What about rain flux? Rain flux is a measure of how much rain hits a surface.
Imagine that it’s raining and I have a board that is in the rain. Here is a diagram.
