Electrical Sources and Fields

The goal of this chapter is to describe, concisely, the fundamental mathematical relationships linking sources and the electric potentials and the current fields they produce. These relationships are presented first in the form used when considering current sources in a conducting medium, the form most often of value in bioelectricity. It is worth keeping in mind that while the basic relationships below occupy only a few paragraphs, their implications are very extensive, and much of the rest of this chapter (and indeed much of the rest of this book) is concerned with their detailed applications.