I doubt you have the ability to see how the Earth's cooling, the flow heat is analogous to current flow in a circuit.
Simply stated the whole is equal to the sum of it's parts.
The superposition theorem for electrical circuits states that for a linear system the response ( Voltage or Current) in any branch of a bilateral linear circuit having more than one independent source equals the algebraic sum of the responses caused by each independent source acting alone, while all other independent sources are replaced by their internal impedances.
This principle has many applications in physics and engineering because many physical systems can be modeled as linear systems. For example, a beam can be modeled as a linear system where the input stimulus is the load on the beam and the output response is the deflection of the beam. The importance of linear systems is that they are easier to analyze mathematically; there is a large body of mathematical techniques, frequency domain linear transform methods such as Fourier, Laplace transforms, and linear operator theory, that is applicable. Because physical systems are generally only approximately linear, the superposition principle is only an approximation of the true physical behavior.
The superposition principle applies to any linear system, including algebraic equations, linear differential equations, and systems of equations of those forms. The stimuli and responses could be numbers, functions, vectors, vector fields, time-varying signals, or any other object which satisfies certain axioms. Note that when vectors or vector fields are involved, a superposition is interpreted as a vector sum. |
