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My physics teacher had been teaching us electrostatics for quite sometime in my school, and frankly, I don't understand a word of her teaching. Hence I had been studying electrostatics on my own.

I have understood the concept of electrostatic potential, the mathematical derivation behind it and the dependence of the potential with the charge present in the space.

There is this sentence in my textbook which I have not understood of, which deals with the electrostatics of the conductor. The property goes as follows-

"Electrostatic potential is constant throughout the volume of the conductor and has the same value(as inside) on its surface."

Can anybody shed light on this property?

Emilio Pisanty
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Vishal Iyer
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When kept in an external electric field , charges are induced on the surface of the conductor which cancel out the field inside the conductor .

Since there is no electric field inside , the potential has to be the same throughout.

Also, all the induced charges are on the surface and not inside the volume. You can apply gauss law to see this

Parth Sindhu
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This is just energy conservation, as the potential inside (say, a conducting sphere) is the same as it is on its surface. If it wasn't, then a potential difference would cause the charges to move; with the energy to drive the charge popping out of nowhere. Energy is not conserved in that case.

This leads to an important observation - the conducting sphere is an equipotential surface.

vs_292
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