Passive Membranes Answer 3

• From the answer to Question 1, it is clear that there is no net potassium flux (and thus, no net current) across the membrane.
• Thus, the fluxes that do occur, because they are balanced out by equal and opposite fluxes, will lead to no changes in potential in the membrane.
• Of course, if we had a very, very sensitive way of measuring the membrane potential, the movements of the potassium ions might not always perfectly balance out at every instant; but what we would observe would be very small random fluctuations around the equilibrium potential; so it would continue to be true that, on average, the potential did not change.