Hi Stephen, You write: >There are two black boxes, each with two terminals on it. One contains >an ideal 1 amp current source in parallel with a 1 ohm resistor; the >other contains an ideal 1 volt voltage source in series with a 1 ohm >resistor. How do you tell which is which?
OK, that at least fits the answer, although it's still not an experiment that can really be done in practice. I can understand this if we're talking about black holes or something, but this is electrical engineering, and we certainly ought to be able to do actual experiments to understand the subject. It's no wonder so many EE's seem to have great difficulty when confronted with an actual analog circuit. The way this stuff is taught is utterly confusing and disconnected from reality. For example, I just built a practical constant current source, using a 5000V voltage supply and a .5 meg resistor in series. Crude, but quite effective for loads under about 50Kohms. For loads over that value, now it folds over and looks more like constant voltage. Elegant? No, but sometime brute force is the best way forward. K.
