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Coulomb's law and Newton's law of universal gravitation are based on action at a distance. Historically, action at a distance was the earliest scientific model for gravity and electricity and it continues to be useful in many practical cases. In the 19th and 20th centuries, field models arose to explain these phenomena with more precision.
Coulomb's inverse-square law, or simply Coulomb's law, is an experimental law [1] of physics that calculates the amount of force between two electrically charged particles at rest. This electric force is conventionally called the electrostatic force or Coulomb force . [ 2 ]
Coulomb's law has charge in place of mass and a different constant. Newton's law was later superseded by Albert Einstein 's theory of general relativity , but the universality of the gravitational constant is intact and the law still continues to be used as an excellent approximation of the effects of gravity in most applications.
The divergence of a vector field which is the resultant of radial inverse-square law fields with respect to one or more sources is proportional to the strength of the local sources, and hence zero outside sources. Newton's law of universal gravitation follows an inverse-square law, as do the effects of electric, light, sound, and radiation ...
Coulomb's law for the electric force between two stationary, electrically charged bodies has much the same mathematical form as Newton's law of universal gravitation: the force is proportional to the product of the charges, inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, and directed along the straight line between them.
Examples include gravity and electromagnetism as described by Newton's law of universal gravitation and Coulomb's law, respectively. The problem is also important because some more complicated problems in classical physics (such as the two-body problem with forces along the line connecting the two bodies) can be reduced to a central-force problem.
The virtual-particle description of static forces is capable of identifying the spatial form of the forces, such as the inverse-square behavior in Newton's law of universal gravitation and in Coulomb's law. It is also able to predict whether the forces are attractive or repulsive for like bodies.
Similarly, the Newtonian gravitation law is a low-mass approximation of general relativity, and Coulomb's law is an approximation to quantum electrodynamics at large distances (compared to the range of weak interactions). In such cases it is common to use the simpler, approximate versions of the laws, instead of the more accurate general laws.