The Magnitude of Electrical Force calculator uses Coulomb's Law to compute the electrical force between two objects based on their charge, the distance between them and Coulomb’s Constant.
INSTRUCTIONS: Choose units and enter the following:
Magnitude of Electrical Force |K|: The force is returned in Newtons. However, this can be automatically converted to compatible units via the pull-down menu.
The magnitude of the electrical force acting between point-like charged objects at a center-to-center distance `r` is given by the equation
`|K| = k(|q_1||q_2|)/(r^2)`
where:
The force is attractive if the charges are of different signs, and repulsive if they have the same sign.
Note that Coulomb's law is closely analogous to Newton's law of the force of gravity, where the magnitude of the force is `Gm_1m_2"/"r^2`, except that there is only one type of mass, not two, and gravitational forces are never repulsive. Because of this close analogy between the two types of forces, we can recycle a great deal of our knowledge of gravitational forces. For instance, there is an electrical equivalent of the shell theorem: the electrical forces exerted externally by a uniformly charged spherical shell are the same as if all the charge was concentrated at its center, and the forces exerted internally are zero.