9.4 Ohm's law

We have been discussing three electrical properties so far in this chapter: current, voltage, and resistance. It turns out that many materials exhibit a simple relationship among the values for these properties, known as Ohm’s law. Many other materials do not show this relationship, so despite being called Ohm’s law, it is not considered a law of nature, like Newton’s laws or the laws of thermodynamics. But it is very useful for calculations involving materials that do obey Ohm’s law.

Description of ohm’s law

The current that flows through most substances is directly proportional to the voltage V applied to it. The German physicist Georg Simon Ohm (1787–1854) was the first to demonstrate experimentally that the current in a metal wire is directly proportional to the voltage applied :

This important relationship is the basis for Ohm’s law    . It can be viewed as a cause-and-effect relationship, with voltage the cause and current the effect. This is an empirical law, which is to say that it is an experimentally observed phenomenon, like friction. Such a linear relationship doesn’t always occur. Any material, component, or device that obeys Ohm’s law, where the current through the device is proportional to the voltage applied, is known as an ohmic    material or ohmic component. Any material or component that does not obey Ohm’s law is known as a nonohmic    material or nonohmic component.

Ohm’s experiment

In a paper published in 1827, Georg Ohm described an experiment in which he measured voltage across and current through various simple electrical circuits containing various lengths of wire. A similar experiment is shown in [link] . This experiment is used to observe the current through a resistor that results from an applied voltage. In this simple circuit, a resistor is connected in series with a battery. The voltage is measured with a voltmeter, which must be placed across the resistor (in parallel with the resistor). The current is measured with an ammeter, which must be in line with the resistor (in series with the resistor).

In this updated version of Ohm’s original experiment, several measurements of the current were made for several different voltages. When the battery was hooked up as in [link] (a), the current flowed in the clockwise direction and the readings of the voltmeter and ammeter were positive. Does the behavior of the current change if the current flowed in the opposite direction? To get the current to flow in the opposite direction, the leads of the battery can be switched. When the leads of the battery were switched, the readings of the voltmeter and ammeter readings were negative because the current flowed in the opposite direction, in this case, counterclockwise. Results of a similar experiment are shown in [link] .