Electric Fields in Physics

An electric field is what a charge leaves behind in the space around it, and the reason the idea is worth inventing is that it separates two questions that used to be tangled together. What does this charge do to the space here, and what happens to a charge that arrives later? The field is the answer to the first, and it exists whether or not anything is there to feel it. Coulomb's law gives the force between two charges directly, but once there are many charges or a spread out distribution, adding the fields at a point is far easier than adding the forces. The blocks give the force law, the field it produces, and how a charged particle responds once it is inside a field.