Free course

Electromagnetism: testing Coulomb’s law

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This free course explores Coulomb’s law, the physical law that governs the force between electric charges, and shows how it can be verified experimentally. As a prerequisite you will need some mathematical knowledge of vectors.

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course SM381 Electromagnetism.

Course learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

describe the properties of Coulomb's law and electrostatic force
determine the force exerted on one stationary charge by another using Coulomb's law
explain some of the uncertainties and errors that can occur in experimental measurements of electrostatic properties.

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First Published: 25/04/2025

Updated: 25/04/2025

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Harrison Khando 18 August 2025 3:57PM

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I liked. It, I taught this course to undergraduates first year at domasi college of education ( Malawi) and though my course covered electric fields, potential, potential energy and magnetism, electric current, voltage and resistance, and coulombs law ofcourse.. the coulombs law part it's pretty much the same, though this one is 60% easier than the one I taught in terms of depths and number of charges but all in all I enjoyed refreshing my knowledge.. testing my own medicine kkk

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Alfredo Prieto 19 July 2025 2:41AM

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Electromagnetism: testing Coulomb’s law

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