RE: [TCML] Primary Capacitance Calculations - "Black Boxes"

[Thomas Schmit <Thomas.Schmit@xxxxxxx>]

Thank you Bart! That is exactly what I was looking for and I will give the site a thorough reading as soon as I get a little free time. I'm looking forward to it, in fact - I expect it to be very interesting.
 
I hope no one has misunderstood me here - I'm not railing on "black boxes". But, as many of you know, "black boxes" must be used with caution! If you don't have a thorough understanding how the device works, you don't know how much leeway you have in the "inputs". 
 
Eg. consider a partial differential solver -  there are many different algorithms out there that are basically closed boxes because the code is proprietary. (Maybe if you were much better at coding than me, you'd be able to hack the software and see what it's doing...) Although they may work great for a specific PDE they will fail miserably if one boundary condition is just a wee bit different. If you naively assume that altering a BC (even in a seemingly trivial way) would have no effect on the validity of the solution, you would be in all kinds of trouble! ;-) So, analogously, I didn't know whether or not these Tesla coil calculations work with my "stiff" voltage source. 
 
Dr. Resonance - How many times did he "derive" Gauss's law before getting bored and moving on? ;-) :-D I knew what you meant, just giving you grief. I'm not sure I agree with you about the Gaussian. It's just a mathematical expresion used to characterize a particular distribution - I'm not sure I would qualify it as a tool. I suppose it's a matter of connotations; I have a different connotative definition of "tool" when applied to physics. Incidentally, I've spent the last year writing scripts that pulled from the ROOFIT library to fit distributions of missing transverse energy in the ATLAS detector. Virtually every distribution is characterized by a double Gaussian with some polynomial supression- except for the "interesting" ones ;-)
 
Also, thank you all again for the "practical" advice. I don't mind a higher break rate and it may be the cheaper route as I can cut down the number of parallel strings for my MMC that way.
 
Tom
 
 
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