Physics: Power and Resistance

Electrical resistance Voltage can be thought of as the pressure pushing charges along a conductor, while the electrical resistance of a conductor is a measure of how difficult it is to push the charges along. Using the flow analogy, electrical resistance is similar to friction. For water flowing through a pipe, a long narrow pipe provides more resistance to the flow than does a short fat pipe. The same applies for flowing currents: long thin wires provide more resistance than do short thick wires.

The resistance (R) of a material depends on its length, cross-sectional area, and the resistivity (the Greek letter rho), a number that depends on the material:

The resistivity and conductivity are inversely related. Good conductors have low resistivity, while poor conductors (insulators) have resistivities that can be 20 orders of magnitude larger.

Resistance also depends on temperature, usually increasing as the temperature increases. For reasonably small changes in temperature, the change in resistivity, and therefore the change in resistance, is proportional to the temperature change. This is reflected in the equations:

At low temperatures some materials, known as superconductors, have no resistance at all. Resistance in wires produces a loss of energy (usually in the form of heat), so materials with no resistance produce no energy loss when currents pass through them.

Physics: Power and Resistance