Coulomb's Law

Section 10.3.4 established, qualitatively, that charged bodies exert attractive or repulsive forces on each other depending on their signs. Coulomb (1736-1806) went further, carrying out the first careful QUANTITATIVE investigation of exactly how large this force is, using point charges -- idealised charges whose own physical size is negligible compared to their separation from other charges, so that only the distance between them (and not their shape or extent) matters. The resulting relationship, Coulomb's law, is the single most fundamental, foundational law governing the interaction between any two charges at rest, and everythi …