Introduction to Electricity

By Youssef Emad Ali

Electrical interactions are a part of one of the main fundamental interactions of nature, that one
being Electromagnetism, but for the sake of time and simplicity, we will only visit the “Electro” part
of “Electromagnetism” and leave the magnetism part for another time. We’ve always experienced
electrical forces in our lives, one way or the other. One way you experience it, for example, is due to
electrons moving in the wires of your phone or computer right now.

These interactions are everywhere in our lives, and they classically operate on basic rules which are
not too hard to grasp. One part of the rule which we’ve always been told since we’re young is that
opposite charges attract, and like charges repel each other, that is one of the main pillars of
electrical interactions which occur in nature. The next one is that the “intensity” or “magnitude” of
these interactions are less over greater distances, in other words; the further two electrical charges
are from each other, the less they would interact with each other, or in technical speak: the less
forces they exert on each other.

Now you might be wondering: “how could an object get charged?” or “What is a charge?” Simply
put; a charge is either positive or negative or neutral, and it is a property associated with all the
matter you interact with. An electron is negatively charged and a proton is positively charged,
practically speaking, the way you would apply a charge on an object is by adding or removing
electrons to that object. At normal conditions, most objects are neutrally charged, with the number
of electrons equalling the number of protons, and therefore their charges “cancel out” leaving you
with a neutrally charged object. If you happen to remove some electrons from an object, you’ll end
up with a positively charged object, since the total number of protons is now greater than electrons,
and the opposite is true for negatively charged objects.

The main equation governing these interactions is Coulomb’s Law, an empirical equation that was
set by the French physicist Charles Augustin de Coulomb. The meaning of the word “empirical” here
is that it was derived by experiment, as opposed to it being discovered by a theoretical process. An
empirical law would generally have its constants determined by experiment. We’ll get more to what
constants represent and what they really are in a later discussion, under the label “Universal
Constants”.

The term “r” here is the distance between the two charges, q1 is the charge of the first charge, q2 is for the
second one, and the rest are just constants.
 Force here is the force exerted by one charge on the other. From Newton’s third law: “Every
force has another force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction” or in other words; for every
action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. This would mean that however the amount that q1
pushes q2, q2 will push it back with the same amount, and the same for attraction as well.

From the (r) part in the equation, you can see that the smaller it gets, the greater the force,
denoted by the symbol “F” would be. Simply due to that you would be dividing by a smaller
number(that number being “r”), and the smaller something gets divided by, the greater the final
product would be. This explains something that you might have experienced if you ever tried to
bring two likely charged objects together. The result is that you’d feel that they don’t like getting
close to each other, and the closer you try to forcefully push them together, the more they will try to
push back. It should be a bit easier to know why that happens, now that after you’ve learned how
like charges tend to push each other apart, the closer they get!

There is much more to electricity, more equations that govern more complicated interactions. Add
magnetism and it’s equations to that, and you get one of the four fundamental interactions in
nature, The Electromagnetic Force. With the 3 remaining being Strong Interactions, Weak
Interactions, and Gravity. We’ll touch more on the electric part of electromagnetism in later
discussions, and then move on to magnetism to get an all-round understanding of the
electromagnetic force and its interactions.

Sources:

Coulomb’s Law:

http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/estatics/Lesson-3/Coulomb-s-Law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coulomb%27s_law

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/elefor.html