h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Electricity, to me, is magic. You flip the light switch and that light had better go on or else. (Or else I'm left cursing the darkness, dammit.)

Tell me about resistance, then. How is the resistance captured and used to activate a simple current? Is it magnetized? Is there a terminated capsule that keeps the magnetism from escaping?

Help!

thank you for reading my article and liking it. although it is edited a lot more than i would like. check out my original.
when I get round to it i will try and publish something on the theory of resistance (and probably capacitance and inductance as well). how ever if your really desperate to learn about resistance i suggest you get a book called "Hughes - Electrical Technology" (it's about £22 from Amazon.co.uk), it covers all sorts of good stuff.

The bit on Ohm's Law is oversimplified, methinks. Ohm's Law actually involves the mathematical relationships between four variables: Power, Current, Voltage, and Resistance. E = I x R is just one of the twelve different formulas that can be extracted from Ohm's Law. Knowledge of any two variables will give you the results for the other two. But since Power is missing from the E = I x R equation, you can't use it to extrapolate the rest of the equations.

ok so i missed power, here it is

P = V * I (p = v * i in ac before you get stroppy)

or P = I * R(squared, sorry no superscript)

however, this was supposed to be the basics and i thought power might be a little advanced for this stage in the game. to be perfectly honest though i've always been told that ohm's law (as stated in my page) has been seperate from what I know as power law (above).

It's nice to talk about Power, but it is not part of Ohm's law. The law is not quite stated correctly in the article. It should read:

This law states that the voltage across a resistor is equal to the product of resistance and current.

read my jounal

I agree. Power is not part of Ohm's Law. It's plain and simple V=IR

Cheers mate it's nice to have a few people concur with me on this point. it's been so long since anyone agreed with me on this site i'd almost forgot what it felt like. No doubt someone will come and turn this on it's head again, or even tell me the unit of resistance was not named after the founder of the law.