Capacitors - continued.

Now we can get back to our earlier discussion.

Please refer to the figure shown here. This figure illustrates a basic capacitor.

A basic capacitor consists of two conducting plates separated by an insulator. In the figure shown here, the two capacitor plates are connected to a battery.

The upper plate of the capacitor is connected to the positive terminal of the battery; the other plate is connected to the negative terminal of the battery. A switch controls the flow of current through the battery.

When the switch is open, the atoms and molecules in the dielectric have a random orientation as shown.