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What you will learn in Electrostatics
1. Electric Charge
Charge is conserved and quantized — rubbing, touching and induction only ever move electrons that were already there.
2. Coulomb's Law
The force between two charges falls off as the square of the distance — the same shape as gravity, roughly 10³⁶ times stronger.
3. The Electric Field
Stop asking what pulls on what and ask what the space itself is doing — force per unit charge, drawn as field lines.
4. Superposition
Every charge contributes as if the others were not there, and the net field is nothing more than their vector sum.
5. Potential and Equipotentials
Potential is energy per unit charge, and the work to move a charge depends only on where it starts and ends.
6. Capacitance
How much charge a geometry holds per volt across it — set by plate area, gap, and what fills the gap.
7. The Van de Graaff Generator
Pile charge onto a dome until the air around it stops insulating — everything in this module, in one machine.
8. Lightning
The same breakdown, at the scale of kilometres — five stages spanning twenty minutes down to seventy microseconds.
9. Conductors and Dielectrics
Inside a conductor the field is zero; inside an insulator it is only weakened — by exactly the dielectric constant κ, which is why a slab between the plates multiplies the capacitance.
10. The Electric Dipole
Two equal and opposite charges: a field that falls as 1/r³, and in a uniform field no net force but a torque p × E that swings the dipole into line.
11. Electric Flux and Gauss's Law
The flux out of any closed surface is the charge inside divided by ε₀ — added up here rather than assumed, and then used to find the fields of a line, a sheet and a shell in one line each.