A Field Line Is a Map, Not a Route

You'll learnto read a field-line picture: direction from the tangent, strength from the spacing, and no promise at all about where a charge will travel.

A charged object changes the space around it, and field lines are the map of that change. But a map can be misread: a proton crosses the lines instead of following them, and a blank patch between lines is full of field. Twelve short steps; press Next for each one.

12 STEPS · 6 QUICK CHECKS · TRACED LINES · MAP, NOT ROUTE · SUPERPOSE · v2

every line is traced from the field · a gap in the ink is not zero

Before you start

What you're looking at

Pink discs are positive charges, blue discs negative. The thin grey curves are field lines, traced by walking the field of those charges.

The question

What does a field-line picture tell you, and what does it not?

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