Coulomb's law

Coulomb's law, developed in the 1780s by French physicist Charles Augustin de Coulomb, may be stated as follows:

The magnitude of the electrostatic force between two point charges is directly proportional to the product of the magnitudes of each charge and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the charges.

This is analogous to Newton's third law of motion in mechanics. The formula of Coulomb's law is of the same form as Newton's gravitational law: The electrical force of one body exerted on the second body is equal to the force exerted by the second body on the first.

Coulomb's law is the mathematical consequence of law of conservation of linear momentum in exchange by virtual photons in 3-dimensional space (see quantum electrodynamics).