BIO. Electrical Sensitivity of Sharks. Certain sharks can detect an electric field as weak as 1.0 μV/m. To grasp how weak this field is, if you wanted to produce it between two parallel metal plates by connecting an ordinary 1.5­V AA battery across these plates, how far apart would the plates have to be?

Video transcript

Welcome back, everyone. We are making observations about a parallel plate capacitor and we are told that it uses a five volt adapter. Now, we are trying to replicate or produce an electric field who has the strength of the earth's magnetic field, which is 50 micro volts per meter. And we are tasked with finding what plate separation is required to achieve that electric field. Let's go ahead and look at our answer choices here. We have a is 0.1 micrometers. B is 100 m. C is 1000 centimeters or D is 100 kilometers. All right. Well, we know that the magnitude of an electric field is just equal to the voltage divided by the distance we want to isolate this D variable. So I'm gonna multiply both sides by D over E D over E this cancels out and this cancels out. And what this leaves us with is that our distance, our desired distance is equal to our voltage divided by our magnetic field. So what is this equal to? Well, this is just gonna be five divided by micro volts per meter, but we need this in volts per meter. So I'm gonna multiply this by 10 to the -6 on the bottom. And what this gives us is 100,000 m. But we need our final answer in kilometers and we know that there's m in one kilometer. These units are going to cancel out which leaves us with a final answer of kilometers corresponding to our final answer. Choice of d Thank you all so much for watching. I hope this video helped see you all in the next one.