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What is the difference between electric firce and elactrostatic force?

What is the difference between electric firce and elactrostatic force?

Grade:11

1 Answers

Sumit Majumdar IIT Delhi
askIITians Faculty 137 Points
10 years ago

Hello student,

Technically speakiing, they are different.

Electrical force is the force that acts on a charged particle resulting from an electric field.

If that field is not a time-varying field (like when the field is a result of the presence of static charges in space), then the force is electrostatic.

If that field is a result of a time-varying electromagnetic field, then the force is technically "electrodynamic" -- an electrical force that is not electrostatic.

So electrostatic force is a special case of electrical force. At introductory levels of physics, the terms tend to be used interchangably since the calculus of time varying fields is usually not in the student''s arsenal of analysis techniques yet.

Thanks & Regards
Sumit Majumdar, 
askIITians Faculty
Ph.D, IIT Delhi

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