Summary: Gauss Law, And Coulomb's Law

Abendanio, Carlo C. BSIT-2B

GAUSS’S LAW There is an important relation in electricity, that is Gauss’s Law. The Gauss' law is a method widely used in electrical applications to calculate electric fields from symmetrically charged objects, it is developed by Mr. Carl Friedrich Gauss, a German mathematician and physicist. I had watched a lecture video about Gauss’s law. This law states that the electric flux through a closed surface is proportional to the charge contained inside the surface. When the electric field, because of its symmetry, is constant everywhere on that surface and perpendicular to it, the exact electric field can be found. In such special cases, Gauss’s law is easier to apply than Coulomb’s law. Gauss’s law involves the concept of electric flux, a measure of how much the electric field vectors penetrate through a given surface. Gauss's law has a close mathematical similarity with a number of laws in other areas of physics, such as Gauss's law for magnetism and Gauss's law for gravity. In fact, any "inverse-square law" can be formulated in a way

A test charge with twice the quantity of charge would possess twice the potential energy at a given location; yet its electric potential at that location would be the same as any other test charge. A positive test charge would be at a high electric potential when held close to a positive source charge and at a lower electric potential when held further away. In this sense, electric potential becomes simply a property of the location within an electric field. Although the concept of electric potential is useful in understanding electrical phenomena, only differences in potential energy are measurable. If an electric field is defined as the force per unit charge, then by analogy an electric potential can be thought of as the potential energy per unit