Question 23.9: Don’t Use Gauss’s Law Here! Explain why Gauss’s law cannot b...

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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