Ratch wrote:
"Chuck Harris" wrote in message
...

Hi Ratch,

What do G. Ohm, J. Maxwell, N. Tesla, J. Watt, Coulomb, Hertz, ...
all have in common?

What does the fact of receiving awards and honors posthumously have
to
do with what we are discussing?

I said nothing of awards and honors! The various scientific societies
went on a spree of naming every little thing after the giants
in the field. Torr, Tesla, Hertz, Ohm, Coulomb, Maxwell, Heisenberg,
Watt, Ampere, Curie, Voltair, and on and on and on. The things that
were named after these people were not necessarily things they had had
anything to do with.

All right, I'll buy that. But if they were awarding names to physical
laws, were they not honoring the men?


George Ohm did NOT name this, or any other formula after himself!
That was done long after his death by fellow engineers and scientists.
It was done to honor the man. His contribution was large, so he got
a fundumental principal.

I will agree to that also



If you ask engineers what is Ohm's law, they will say E = iR,


Only because they learned it that way. If you explained the
misnomer,
then what would they say?

They would say, it is not a misnomer, it is just a different equation
that is also given Ohm's name.

But wrongly. Ohm's law is a property, not a equation.


A misnomer is not a study approach. Voltage and current have the
same
meaning throughout science no matter how many different ways they are
studied or explained by representative analogs.

You imagine that Ohm did only one thing, and that he named that thing
after himself. He did not. He did many things over his lifetime.
There is no one equation that sums up his life's work. The equations
named for Ohm were named by others long after his death. The naming
was done to honor the man for his contributions to the sciences.

I know that Ohm did many things, just like Newton did things other than
explain mass attraction. I maintain that
Ohm's law is named after a resistive linearity principle, and the resistance
formula V=IR is used to explain that
principle. Some people later got careless and started calling the resistance
formula Ohm's law.


So, just as you can quote a couple of physics text books and "prove"
that ohm's law is one thing, I can quote an equal number of
engineering text books that say otherwise.

Physics and mathematics are foundation sciences of
electrical/electronics engineering. If they don't agree, then EE is the one
that should change, unless it can be proved that physics is in error.
Otherwise it is the tail wagging the dog.



Those texts I quoted are really good college level textbooks.
Would
the authors you would quote be able to defend their writings after being
shown what I believe is the error of their ways? Ratch

And the texts in my library are also "really good college level
textbooks", written by prominent members of the electrical engineering
field.

I know, I have a lot of them myself. But the parts that do not follow
physics are suspect.


Resnick is just another contemporary author of a physics book.

I don't think that Prof Resnick is with us anymore.

He is only restating what he was told, or what he believes to be true.

Right, see below.

If you check his book out, you will find that there are no references
cited to back up his work.

True, it is a textbook, not a physics reference. The book already is
huge. Most textbooks don't give references because of bloat, and it becomes
subjective on how extensive they should be.

This is primarily because the college
text books are restatements of restatements .... It is hard to tell
where all the info originlly came from. The books are written by
professors, and professors, well, profess.

It is certainly true that what a professor writes is going to be what
he believes to be factual. And impossible to discern how he came upon his
knowledge. But you have to ask yourself, why did Professors Resnick and
Serway go out of their way to make a point that Ohm's law is a property of a
material and not V=IR? Does that not indicate that they looked into the
matter more closely that their contemporaries? The next time I get to a
good college library, I will look at other college physics textbooks. Ratch