I've been trying to figure this out on my own for days and finally decided to start googling. For reference I'm self studying Griffith's E&M textbook. I'm at the part where he derives the equation for the electric potential V of a point charge at the origin. Which he gives as $\frac{1}{4\pi\epsilon}\frac{q}{r}$. He then goes on to say that you can use the superposition principle to move from this to the sum $\frac{1}{4\pi\epsilon}\sum_{i=0}^{n}\frac{q_{i}}{r}$ Where here $r$ is understood to be the distance from the source charge to the test point
However this forumula, blindly applied, gives rise to a commonly asked question on this and other forums. If you use it to compute the potential at the midpoint between 2 opposite charges you get 0. And this together with $\vec{E} = -\nabla V$ gives a 0 for the electric field. Clearly this is wrong since the particle should be moving away from the positive charge towards the negative one.
Since we know the Electric field of a point charge we can compute the net field directly via superposition. Since the negative charge has a separation vector that is opposite that of the positive charge the expected answer is $\vec{E} = \frac{1}{\pi\epsilon}\frac{2q}{d^{2}}\hat{d}$. Where $d$ is the separation distance between the 2 charges (making our test point at $\frac{d}{2}$)
So what gives? How is the answer simultaneously 0 and not 0? Other posts on this topic have skirted around answering the exact question I have. Which is all these equations are held to be universally true. I understand that the electric field is not actually zero. I can visualize the inflection point between the hill of positive potential and the valley of negative potential. But just from raw analytic calculation I would expect these equations to agree