Question 24.6: Don’t Use Gauss’s Law Here! Explain why Gauss’s law cannot b......

Physics for Scientists and Engineers with Modern Physics [1418134]

Don’t Use Gauss’s Law Here!

Explain why Gauss’s law cannot be used to calculate the electric field near an electric dipole, a charged disk, or a triangle with a point charge at each corner.

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The charge distributions of all these configurations do not have sufficient symmetry to make the use of Gauss’s law practical. We cannot find a closed surface surrounding any of these distributions for which all portions of the surface satisfy one or more of conditions (1) through (4) listed at the beginning of this section.

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