3k views

### Why is Coulomb's law is an inverse square law? [duplicate]

I read about Coulomb's law it says the force of attraction or repulsion between two charges is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. So generally if I say then Coulomb'...
1k views

### Why do fields decrease with distance? [duplicate]

For example, electric, gravitational field decreases with $1/r^2$. Is it like decrease of energy of an object when goes it is moving with friction/air drag etc? Does it mean that field's strength is ...
219 views

### How can we be certain our world has only three spatial dimensions? [duplicate]

It's common knowledge that the universe has three spatial dimensions, and one temporal. But how can we be so sure? Physics tells us that vector forces act independently along different dimensions, so ...
87 views

### Is there an underlying reason why some forces are inversely proportional to the square of the distance? [duplicate]

This is the first time I'm studying those subjects (I'm still in high school) and my teacher couldn't give me an answer. I'm referring specially to Newton's law of gravitation and Coulomb's law of ...
76 views

### Is there a higher-level reason why $\nabla\cdot(\hat{\bf r}/r^2) = 0$ in three dimensions but not two? [duplicate]

I am working through Griffiths, Introduction to Electrodynamics, and finding the divergence of the electric field generated by a single charge sitting at the origin. \mathbf{E}(\mathbf{r}) = \frac{\...
46 views

### Does gravity exist in higher dimensions? [duplicate]

I’m very curious to know whether gravity exists in higher dimensions. Because it follows the inverse square law it seems to me that it should be 3D only (just intuition). Is there any mathematical ...
20 views

### Scepticism regarding the exponent of -2 in Coulombs law? [duplicate]

So lately I was speculating why nature choose the number 2 in Coulomb's law like why not 2.$10^{100}$ trailing zeros and then 1 or anything else. I find 2 a bit arbitrary the given explanation being ...
6k views

### Why are so many forces explainable using inverse squares when space is three dimensional?

It seems paradoxical that the strength of so many phenomena (Newtonian gravity, Coulomb force) are calculable by the inverse square of distance. However, since volume is determined by three ...
2k views

### How can we be so sure the universe has 3 dimensions?

I'm just a layman here so please bear with me if I don't get all the words or theories by correct name or whatever. I hope it will be clear enough what my question is. Here goes: When I read articles ...
4k views

### What could we observe if we see a 4 dimensional object and how could it change our physics view about our universe?

My question is little bit philosophical. I would like to explain my ideas with a 2 dimensional universe model. If we had lived in 2 dimensional universe like a plane, What could we observe when ...
4k views

### Why does the universe exhibit three large-scale spatial dimensions? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: Is 3+1 spacetime as privileged as is claimed? Regardless of your favorite theory of how many dimensions the universe has in total, the universe seems to have a deep preference ...
2k views

### Will Gauss's law still hold in case of deviation from inverse square law?

Assume a spherical metallic shell over which a charge $Q$ is distributed uniformly. Applying Gauss's law $\displaystyle\oint\textbf{E}\cdot d\textbf{a}=\frac{Q_{\text{enc.}}}{\epsilon_0}$ by ...
1k views

### Inverse Square Law and extra space dimensions

Newton's famous Inverse Square Law says that in $n=3$ dimension of space, force is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between a source and a target. I understand that for higher ...