What follows are ideas I have along with established concepts.
Concentration Voltaic Cell
A concentration cell is a type of voltaic cell where the reactants are the same chemical species. So, there’s no difference in electronegativity between them. Both electrodes are of this chemical species, and it’s in both ionic solutions. However, the ionic solutions have different concentrations of it. The half cell with the ionic solution that has more of it is the cathode half cell. For example, with the nickel concentration cell, the electrodes are both made of nickel, and both half cell ionic solutions have nickel cations in them. However…
What follows are ideas I have along with established concepts.
Electrostatics
The surface contour or curvature of a metallic solid defines its properties. This occurs with the surface layer of atoms. When it’s electrically neutral, then the contour shape doesn’t matter because all electric fields cancel locally with adjacent charges. However, when there’s excess charge, which can only exist at the surface, then the contour shape becomes a factor because the excess charges interact with each other all along the conductor’s surface through mutual repulsions, and the surface curvature influences or determines the nature of these interactions (Purcell, 27). The excess…
What follows are ideas I have along with established concepts.
Capacitors
A capacitor consists of two metal plates which are separated by an insulator. A capacitor is charged by a battery (Chabay, 765)). What follows is an explanation about how to charge a capacitor using a copper/zinc voltaic cell. It’s assumed that the capacitor plates are made of the same type of metal, have the same surface area, and are both initially electrically neutral. One capacitor plate is connected to the zinc anode by a wire, and the other one is connected by a wire to the copper cathode. The electrodes…
What follows are ideas I have along with established concepts.
Electric Eel Electrocytes
An electric eel electrocyte is centimeters wide from the center of the animal to its skin, around 1.5 millimeters high in the bottom to top direction, and 80 micrometers thick in the back to front direction (Sperelakis, 1026). So, it’s like a long thin rectangular strip (Sperelakis, 858). This is unlike with most electrocytes which are cylindrical and disk like (Markham, 3). In addition to each electrocyte being innervated by a separate motor neuron, each electrocyte is also innervated in multiple different places along this wide part by different branches…
What follows are ideas I have along with established concepts.
How Batteries Really Work
A battery consists of one or more voltaic cells (Brown, Theodore, 854). A voltaic cell consists of: two conducting electrodes, the cathode and the anode; a conducting wire to connect them together, and an electrolyte. Redox reactions occur at the electrodes. The reactants in redox reactions have differences in electronegativity meaning that one reactant wants electrons more than the other. An electrolyte contains ions which are used to neutralize electrical disequilibrium that occurs at the electrodes as the chemical reactions proceed. …
What follows are ideas I have along with established concepts.
Electric Fish
There are two types of electric fish, strongly electric and weakly electric. As the names imply, strongly electric fish produce high voltages, and weakly electric fish produce low voltages. Strongly electric organs are used for defense and predation, whereas weakly electric organs are used for electrolocation and electrocommunication (Kramer, 1050, 1055; Markham, 1). Electrolocation is that an electric fish uses the electric field it creates to navigate its environment (Kramer, 1055). When an object comes into contact with its electric field, the object distorts the electric field, and the electric…
What follows are ideas I have along with established concepts.
Excitable Cells
A cell is a compartment that separates the environment within the cell from the environment outside of the cell. This is due to the cell membrane, which consists of a phospholipid bilayer and proteins (Sperelakis, 220). A cell membrane is selectively permeable, which means that it only allows some substances to cross it (Hickman, 45). Water, which is the most abundant substance in an organism and is the, “solvent for all living matter,” is allowed to freely cross a cell membrane (Silverthorn, 132; Hickman, 20, 46). This is called osmosis…
What follows are ideas I have along with established concepts.
Valence Electron Shell
Electrons exist around a nucleus as standing waves. A standing wave is a stationary wave that’s created by traveling or moving waves which interact or interfere with each other constructively and destructively. Constructive interference results in traveling waves adding together, and destructive interference results in traveling waves cancelling out with each other. So, standing waves only actually exist at the locations where there’s constructive interference. These locations are called antinodes. The locations where there’s destructive interference and therefore where no standing wave exists are called nodes.
The reason an electron…
What follows are ideas I have along with established concepts.
Standard Hydrogen Electrode
The electronegativity level of a voltaic cell half cell is defined in reference with a universally used half cell called the Standard Hydrogen Electrode (SHE) (Brown, 839, 840). It’s a sealed container that consists of an electrically neutral platinum electrode that’s partly submerged in a solution of hydrogen cations, and there’s a concentration of hydrogen gas in the space above the ionic solution. The platinum electrode is connected to the other electrode by a platinum wire.
Platinum, a transition metal, is called a noble metal because of how unreactive it…
