Chapter 48 of 2363 min read

Coulomb's law and superposition

Why this is asked: Force from multiple charges adds as vectors, not scalars — the net force on a charge comes from superposing each pairwise Coulomb force with its own direction, so just adding magnitudes fails whenever the charges aren't collinear.

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Test yourself

•Two identical charged conducting spheres A and B have their centres separated by a certain distance. The charge on each sphere is $q$ and the force of repulsion between them is $F$ . A third identical uncharged conducting sphere is brought in contact with sphere A first and then with B, and finally removed from both. The new force of repulsion between spheres A and B (the radii of A and B are negligible compared to the distance of separation, so they can be considered point charges) is best given as:

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