THE FIELDS OF MOVING CHARGES — Edward Purcell & David Morin
Physics — E&M · discharging-a-capacitor-energy
Problem
Discharging a capacitor **
Return to the example of the capacitor C discharging through the resistor R, which was worked out in Section 4.11, and show that the total energy dissipated in the resistor agrees with the energy originally stored in the capacitor. Suppose someone objects that the capacitor is never really discharged because Q becomes zero only for t=∞. How would you counter this objection? You might find out how long it would take the charge to be reduced to one electron, with some reasonable assumptions.