Real Life Applications – Electrostatics - Coulomb's Law

If a pair of one coulomb charges – one positive and the other negative – were separated by a distance of one meter their attractive force is 9 billion Newtons!  That is about the weight of ten battleships.  I show the kids a picture of a battleship and have them hold an arm out.  I tell them that the positive coulomb on charge is on their finger while the negative coulomb is on their nose – that is about a meter apart.  Then I tell them to imagine that the charges were “let go”.  This then the begs the obvious question as to why are we then not crushed by these charges which leads nicely to a conversation on the topic of repulsive and attractive forces.  (Thank you Paul Hewitt for this gem.)