Tue 3 Mar 2009
Flux Capacitors
Posted by admin under Circuit Theory, Electromagnetics, Mathematics
[3] Comments
One of my favorite things to point out to friends of mine is this fact:
Remember in Back to the Future (I, II, and III) Doc Brown used a “flux capacitor” to travel through time? Well, what if I told you that every capacitor is a flux capacitor?
Well that’s true. As a simple example, say I took a capacitor and hooked it up to a battery, as below. Then I show the capacitor as two metal plates with electric field between them, and a surface “S” parallel to the two plates.
As this crude analysis points out, the flux is nonzero so long as the voltage across the capacitor – any capacitor – is nonzero.
Movie fans will point out that this isn’t magnetic flux, to which I have two rebuttals:
1.) the movie never states whether Doc Brown means electric or magnetic flux
2.) fine, you want a magnetic flux capacitor? I give you, the mystical LC network – the transmission line stub, the antenna, the cavity resonator…etc.
Sorry Robert Zemeckis.
March 3rd, 2009 at 11:59 pm
A friend of mine just emailed me one of your articles from a while back. I read that one a few more. Really enjoy your blog. Thanks
April 7th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Actually, if you excited it with a time-varying field you will find a self resonance, or at any point, where you will have both magnetic and electric flux.
The resonance is key for time travel. At least that’s what Tesla thought.
April 7th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Ha, right, time varying electric field generates time varying magnetic field generates electric field generates…
Tesla is going to appear someday, in the future, from the past. It’s going to blow everyone’s mind.