Name: ____________________________ Date: _________________ Coulomb’s Law LAB This lab uses the PHET Gravity Force Lab located at https://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulation/coulombs-law THEORY The idea of electrical forces has been known since ancient times, with static electricity being discovered the by Greeks. However, generating static electricity was difficult to do with precision. Sometimes you got more electric charge and sometimes less electric charge, so determining the nature of electric forces was difficult to do in detail. By the 18th Century, however, scientists had developed ways of generate and store considerable and reproducible static electric charges. This led to a more thorough understanding of the nature of static electricity. In 1785, a French natural scientist named Charles Augustin de Coulomb published a paper describing the relationship between electric charge and the forces produced by those charges upon one another. The mathematical description of that relationship has come to be known as Coulomb’s Law. This law is written today as F e =k e q 1 q2 r2 where Fe is the electrostatic force, the q’s are the charges, r is the separation between the charges, and ke is the electrostatic constant (sometimes called the Coulomb constant). The electrostatic constant has been determined to be given by k e=8.98755179×109 N⋅m2 . C2 Coulomb’s law has been tested over as far a range in sizes and configurations as physics allows, and it seems to hold in all cases.