What is Current Chopping?

A Light Dimmer for incandescent bulbs is basically a current chopper. Get youself a scope (oscilloscope) and run a light dimmer on it. Then you will actually see how a chopped current curve looks like.

Although you are not incorrect, I think it is out of context because of his reference to air blast (high voltage) circuit breakers.

Chopping Current (if you change the syntax), as it somewhat relates to what you cut and pasted above, is a phenomenon that happens when you break contacts in circuit breakers or contactors used in high energy circuits. In a nutshell, as the contacts open, an arc forms and at some point the gap increases enough to where the arc can't sustain itself any longer across the dielectric formed by the gap and extinguishes. When that happens the current flow suddenly stops, called a Chop, which can create additional problems for the equipment as that sudden change in power flow interacts with other capacitive and inductive elements of the circuit and devices. An Air Blast circuit breaker would do that by squirting a strong puff of air (from a bellows) into the arc as the contacts open, causing the current to stop flowing (Chop it) earlier than it would have otherwise.

But what I think that statement is saying is that an air-blast circuit breaker will chop the current irregardless of the magnitude of the overall current flow.

I don't agree, but then I didn't write it

For additional information about 'Current Chopping', open this Google book and go to the section 9.14 (page 9-29). A good information is there.

http://books.google.co.in/books?id=s7UpveEGnNsC&pg=PT209#v=onepage&q=&f=false

I hope it helps to understand the current chopping.

- MS