A couple of years ago, as part of my efforts to use interactive visualizations as a learning tool, I wrote a Mathematica notebook for the Introductory Physics class to allow one to visualize the electric field lines and equipotential surfaces from a collection of point charges. Charges could be added or removed, moved around freely and the strength of each charge changed. This was a valuable tool for students in the class to develop an intuition for how electric fields behave and to identify their many interesting geometric properties.
I’ve now converted the notebook into a demonstration which has today been accepted on the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. This means it’s permanently available and usable by everyone with the free Wolfram Computable Document Format player.
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