6 Questions
What did Coulomb find about the force between two point charges?
It varied inversely as the square of the distance.
How did Coulomb treat charged bodies when their linear size was much smaller than the distance between them?
He treated them as point charges.
What did Coulomb use to measure the force between two charged metallic spheres?
A torsion balance
How did Coulomb discover a relation like the one in Eq.(1.1) when the charges on the spheres were unknown?
He put one sphere in contact with an identical uncharged sphere and observed the charge distribution.
What was the charge on each sphere after Coulomb put a charged sphere in contact with an identical uncharged sphere?
$q/2$
What was Coulomb's process for determining different charges like $q/2, q/4$, etc., on metallic spheres?
Repeating contact with identical uncharged spheres
Study Notes
- Coulomb's law is a quantitative statement about the force between two point charges, where the force is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the charges and directly proportional to the product of the charges' magnitudes.
- Charged bodies are treated as point charges when their size is much smaller than the distance separating them.
- Coulomb used a torsion balance to measure the force between two charged metallic spheres, treating them as point charges when the separation between them is much larger than the radius of each sphere.
- Coulomb discovered the relationship in Eq. (1.1) by starting with an unknown charge on a metallic sphere, spreading the charge to an identical uncharged sphere through contact, and repeating the process to get different charge values.
- Coulomb varied the distance between fixed pairs of charges and measured the force at different separations to experimentally verify his findings.
Test your knowledge about Coulomb's law and point charges in this quiz. Explore the relationship between force, distance, and charge magnitude according to Coulomb's findings.
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