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Home  Electricity Fields of Force Summary |
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Summary - FieldsNewton conceived of a universe where forces reached across space instantaneously, but we now know that there is a delay in time before a change in the configuration of mass and charge in one corner of the universe will make itself felt as a change in the forces experienced far away. We imagine the outward spread of such a change as a ripple in an invisible universe-filling field of force.We define the gravitational field at a given point as the force per unit mass exerted on objects inserted at that point, and likewise the electric field is defined as the force per unit charge. These fields are vectors, and the fields generated by multiple sources add according to the rules of vector addition. When the electric field is constant, the voltage difference between two points lying on a line parallel to the field is related to the field by the equation ΔV = -Ed, where d is the distance between the two points.
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