Electricity and Magnetism Study Guide: 127 Flashcards from Amber to the Lorentz Force
Study electricity and magnetism with 127 flashcards: Coulomb, field lines, Faraday and Lenz, the Lorentz force, plus the 6 missing cards to write yourself.
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Most electricity-and-magnetism decks are formula dumps. Electricity & Magnetism (deck code FG8430, 127 cards) is not: it reads like two textbooks stapled together, and that's the key to studying it well.
Study this deck: Electricity & Magnetism
1 / 10Electricity
Tap the card for the answer · swipe right if you knew it, left if not
Two blocks, two jobs
- Cards 1-73: the story of electricity. Electric fish in Egyptian texts (2750 BCE), Thales rubbing amber, Gilbert coining electricus, Franklin's kite, Ørsted's compass needle in 1820, Faraday's homopolar motor (1821), Maxwell in 1864. The physics is woven into the history: charge, field lines, potential, the volt, DC vs AC, circuits.
- Cards 74-127: a magnetism glossary. Short, exam-style definitions and the only real formulas in the deck: flux, Lenz, the Lorentz force, right-hand rules, generators, transformers, types of magnetism.
Do the second block first. It's denser, and the history in block 1 makes more sense once you know what a flux or an EMF is.
Cards worth knowing cold
| Front | Back |
|---|---|
| Elementary charge value | Exactly 1.602176634×10⁻¹⁹ coulombs |
| How does electromagnetic force compare to gravitational force? | The force pushing two electrons apart is 10⁴² times their gravitational attraction |
| How is one volt defined? | One joule of work to bring one coulomb of charge from infinity |
| Three key properties of field lines | Start on + and end on −; enter conductors at right angles; never cross |
| Formula for Faraday's law | EMF = −dΦ/dt |
| Magnetic flux | Φ = BA cos θ, measured in webers |
| Lorentz force | F = q(E + v × B) |
| Diamagnetism | Weak repulsion, present in all materials, from induced currents opposing the field |
What the deck covers
Coulomb's law, conservation of charge, static electricity, the gold-leaf electroscope, conventional current, test charges, Faraday cages, lightning (up to 100 MV), equipotentials, the kilowatt hour (3.6 MJ), the ohm, farad and henry, capacitors and inductors, solenoids, electromagnets, magnetic domains, dipoles, monopoles (none observed), mutual and self-inductance, Ampère's law, eddy currents, the Hall effect, hysteresis, permeability, ferro-, para- and diamagnetism, MRI, galvanometers, auroras and the magnetosphere.
Cards to merge before you start
The seam between the blocks leaves duplicates: Faraday's law appears twice (cards 59 and 80), the henry twice (66 and 109), and Lenz's law twice (84 and 85). Keep the version that carries the formula or the unit and suspend the other.
Write these cards yourself
Card 111 says Maxwell's equations are four equations, but the deck only covers two of them (Faraday and Ampère). Gauss's law and Gauss's law for magnetism (∇·B = 0, the "no monopoles" law behind card 97) never get a card. Ohm's law is stated in words only, and neither V = IR nor P = IV appears. There's nothing on Kirchhoff's laws or on resistors in series and parallel either. Add those six cards and the deck covers a full first-year course.
Study tip: only about 6 cards ask you to calculate anything. Use this deck to learn the concepts and the units, and do your problem practice from a textbook.
Keep going
After this deck, move on to Waves and Optics, where Maxwell's electromagnetic waves turn into light, or go back to basics with Kinematics and Newton's Laws.
Find FG8430 — Electricity & Magnetism in the library on Flip It.
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