Electric Fields and Force on a Charge Interactive

One way to deal with electric forces is to calculate explicitly the Coulomb force between every pair of particles. That works fine when there are just two particles, but what happens when there are three, or four, or a thousand? In that case, it often helps to consider an electric field: a vector quantity which has a magnitude and direction at all points in space. The field describes the force that a particle with one Coulomb of charge would feel at that point. A cousin of the electric field is the electric potential: a scalar quantity which describes the amount of energy it would take to move a particle with one Coulomb of charge from an infinite distance to any particular location in space.