Coulomb’s Law – Explanation of Statement , Formulas-Principle, Limitation of Coulomb’s Law

This article is about coulomb’s law. Here I have tried to explain it in simple words. Hope it helps you in understanding the coulomb’s law in a comprehensive way.

As mentioned in earlier article, it had been first observed in 600 before Christ by Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus, if two bodies are charged with static electricity( by rubbing them with appropriate material), they’ll either repel or attract one another relying upon the nature of their charge. This was simply an observation however he did’t establish any mathematical formulation for the measurement of force of attraction or repulsion between charged bodies.

Coulomb’s Law -Formulation Of Thales’ Observation

After several centuries, in 1785, the mathematical formulation for measurement of force between two charged bodies was published by Charles Augustin de Coulomb who is a French physicist. Coulomb derived an equation for the calculation of repulsive or attractive force between two charged particles. The statement given by Coulomb, that leads us to measurement of electric force between two charged particles, is most popularly known as Coulomb’s law.

Statement of Coulomb’s Law

We can break coulomb’s law for magnitude and direction of force in two parts as follow –

First Part (About Magnitude) :

The force ( electrostatic ) of attraction or repulsion between two electrically charged particles is in direct proportion to the product of magnitudes of their charges and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

Second Part ( About Direction):

The direction of force is along the line joining two charged particles, being inwards if two charged particles are of opposite nature and outwards if two are of same nature.