Question

You're sitting inside an uncharged, hollow spherical shell. sud- denly someone dumps a billion coulombs of charge on the shell, distributed uniformly. what happens to the electric field at your location?

Answer 1

The electric field inside a hollow spherical shell remains zero when the shell is uniformly charged, due to the distribution of charges on the surface that results from electrostatic equilibrium.

Step-by-step explanation:

When a billion coulombs of charge is distributed uniformly on an uncharged, hollow spherical shell, the electric field at a location inside the shell remains unaffected. This is because charges on a conductor redistribute themselves in response to their mutual repulsion until they are evenly distributed on the surface, creating a situation where the electric field inside the conductor is zero. This phenomenon is the result of the electrostatic equilibrium where free charges within the conductor move in such a way as to cancel any internal electric fields. Consequently, regardless of the amount of charge placed on the shell, there will be no electric field inside the shell. This important property can be understood through Gauss's law, which tells us that the electric field inside a charged spherical conductor is zero.

Outside the spherical shell, however, the electric field would be as if all the charge were concentrated at a point at the center of the sphere. The electric field outside is therefore the same as that created by a point charge with the same quantity of excess charge placed at the center of the sphere.

Answer 2

When we place a charge at the center of the hollow sphere, the charge spreads all over its surface leaving no charge at the center or inside the shell. To determine the electric field, we draw a Gaussian surface inside the shell. The charge enclosed by this imaginary(Gaussian) surface is zero. Therefore, electric field at every point inside hollow spherical shell is zero.