Rephrasing Faraday's Law
Stacey Hill · The Physics Teacher · 2010
As physics educators, we must often find the balance between simplicity and accuracy. Particularly in introductory courses, it can be a struggle to give students the level of understanding for which they're ready without misrepresenting reality. Of course, it's in these introductory courses that our students begin to construct the conceptual framework that they'll flesh out over a physics curriculum. So a misrepresentation at this early stage will seed difficulties and stubborn misconceptions that can persist or even strengthen through subsequent courses, especially since many upper-level texts focus more on techniques and would not directly challenge mistaken concepts. In the worst cases, our students retain misunderstandings past graduation, and even pass them on to their own students. One important case is the common representation of Faraday's law as showing that a time-varying magnetic field causes a circulating electric field.