tom and david:

i thought you guys were believers in ohm's "law". if 1 MV is applied
across an ideal ohms law resistor with a value of, say, 500,000 ohm (100
ohm), characteristic of a very dry (soaked with salt water) human being,
the current would be 2 A (10,000 A), and the corresponding thermal power
would be 2 MW (10 GW). note that the average hydroelectric output of the
entire bonneville power administration is some 6 GW. of course, ohm's law
fails in such unfortunate circumstances.

my absolutely final word on ohm's law:

given an ordinary resistor we can accurately predict current for any given
applied voltage (using ohm's law); if we don't know the resistance before
hand, we can measure the current for one particular voltage and we have
completely solved the resistor problem (obviously, to some finite level of
precision). now, however, suppose the cuurent is measured for a given
applied voltage across a diode. as suggested, one could always use ohm's
law to compute an effective resistance at these particular values of
current and voltage.  that same effective resistance, however, cannot be
used in ohm's "law" to accurately predict the current at another,
arbitrary applied voltage. ohm's law is a valid in the appropriate regime,
but fails otherwise.

dlk

On Fri, 14 Nov 2003 15:15:53 -0600, tom ring <taring@TARING.ORG> wrote:

>You missed a 0, it's 100 KW!  Really woohoo!
>
>On 14 Nov 2003 at 15:31, David Beierl wrote:
>
>> At 05:56 AM 11/13/2003, Andrew Grebneff wrote:
>> >battery... or an electrocution! (a 100mA current of 1,000,000V will
>> >not even be felt).
>>
>> Woo-hoo -- wanna bet?  That's ten kilowatts...
>>
>> ;)
>> d
>>
>>
>> --
>> David Beierl -- dbeierl@attglobal.net
>>
>
>
>
>--------------------------------------------------
>
>``If I had all the money I've spent on cars ...
>  I'd spend it all on cars'' -- Scott Fisher