Windows Vista

I think its a wonderful software! It is simple to use and takes a riduculosly small disc space. It gives a wonderful vizualation of the electric field lines and eqipotential curves. It can also be used to visualise gravitational fields since theire behaviour is very simple in the case of Newtonian gravitation. A picture is worth a thouthand words so just take a look at this great free software!

Now that I'm projecting class notes from my computer, having computer programs like Electric Field is an excellent way to illustrate physics principles for the class. We've just mapped equipotential lines of an actual set up between two point charges and now we can look at Electric Field to see how it shows the equipotential lines. The students then tried to draw the electric field lines and I'll be able to show them the result they should get using Electric Field.

The Electric Field program does a nice job but sometimes it gets a little over zealous.

For example if I line up a system with three positive charges in a triangle with a negative charge in the center of the base line instead of having the same number of lines off each charge, the program sends three times as many lines into the negative charge.

Also, if you align four charges in a perfect square (locking to grid) there are still field lines in the center.

I would also like to only have four lines off each charge if possible so if I am using it to teach it is faster to count.

The program does a nice job giving a good picture of the field lines but is hard to teach with because of inaccuracies.

I was looking for a program to produce a diagram of field lines for a presentation. This is a toy. Not useful for anything seious. It lacks a way to enter a layout using coordinates.

It makes a pretty good visual for me when I'm doing my physics homework. That being said it would be nice if you could type in coordinates to get a specific setup, maybe you can and I haven't found it yet? But pretty decent for a free download.

I looked at this to begin understanding electric fields in connection with a physics class. The program draws flux lines and equipotential curves given user-defined point charges.

The interface is very easy to figure out. I found the program quickly useful to get a sense of the eqilibrium areas based on a handful of point charges.

Obtaining specific quantities seems more difficult.
Units of measure for distance and charge are not explicitly stated. Field strength and potential are reported unitless.

I found the drawing of the electric field lines to be flawed. It often drew pairs of lines close to one another when only one line should have appeared. This made this application useless to me.

Is a really good program to graphic electric fields...

This program was used to help chemistry students understand terms like "shielding" when applied to discussions of the nucleus and surrounding electrons. (A ring -1 charges was put around a single larger positively charged particle.) It also helped to demonstrate the electric field around a dipole by creating simple (2 charge) dipoles and more complicated dipoles like might be found in an atom whose charges are not symmetrically distributed at a given point in time. It is also interesting to contrast the local field to the far field.

One interface suggestion would be to make keys modify the mouse so that it could be used to add, delete and duplicate points; the unmodified mouse would only move points.

Two other things: should the old field lines be erased before drawing the new lines if charges have been changed in number or position? Also, I always seemed to have a couple inches of garbage in the print preview window at the bottom. I never tried to print so am not sure if it would have come out in the print copy, or not.

I've used commercial programs that did not have the easy-to-use features of this one. It really helped to illustrate the electric field directions, strengths, and the potential surfaces. Try it out...you'll not be disappointed!