4 ms·
That, along with the parent comment, clinched it for me. Thank you.
by sopooneo 6y ago
That, along with the parent comment, clinched it for me. Thank you.
- CamperBob2 6y agoI think the Wikipedia article's final sentence is probably the easiest way to visualize the question if you want to stick to electrical terms. If there's just one capacitor and you short it out by closing the switch, it's not hard to see how all of the energy vanishes, rather than complicating the question by referring to half of it.
- wrycoder 6y agoEnergy doesn’t vanish. Part of it is dissipated in the wire’s resistance and the rest is radiated as EM energy in a ring-down oscillation.
- CamperBob2 6y agoYes, and that's the point; to answer the paradox you have to explain where the seemingly-"vanished" energy goes, and that's relatively straightforward in the single-capacitor case. It's then equally straightforward to see how the same explanation applies to the more contrived case of two capacitors.