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June 23, 2015 By Brian Skinner

There’s a good chance that, at some point in your life, someone told you that
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nature has four fundamental forces: gravity, the strong nuclear force, the weak
nuclear force, and the electromagnetic force.

Be Slightly Evil
This factoid is true, of course.

But what you probably weren’t told is that, at the scale of just about any natural
thing that you are likely to think about, only one of those four forces has any
relevance.  Gravity, for example, is so obscenely weak that one has to collect
planet-sized balls of matter before its e�ect becomes noticeable.  At the other
extreme, the strong nuclear force is so strong that it can never go unneutralized
over distances larger than a few times the diameter of an atomic nucleus ( ∼ 10−15
meters); any larger object will essentially never notice its existence.  Finally, the
weak nuclear force is extremely short-ranged, so that it too has e�ectively no
in�uence over distances larger than ∼ 10−15 meters.
Gervais Principle

That leaves the electromagnetic force, or, in other words, the Coulomb
interaction.  This is the familiar law that says that like charges repel each and
opposites attract.  This law alone dominates the interactions between essentially
all objects larger than an atomic nucleus ( 10−15 meters) and smaller than a planet
(107 meters).  That’s more than twenty powers of ten.

But not only does the “four fundamental forces” meme give a false sense of
egalitarianism between the forces, it is also highly misleading for another reason. 
Namely, in physics forces are not considered to be “fundamental”.  They are,
instead, byproducts of the objects that really are fundamental (to the best of our
knowledge): �elds.

Let me back up a bit.  To understand what a force is, one �rst has to accept the
idea that empty space is not really empty.

Empty space, or vacuum, is the stage upon which the pageantry of nature plays
out.  Just as the setup of the stage in a theater determines what kind of plays can
be performed, so too do the properties of the vacuum determine what kind of
natural laws we have.

Let me be a little less wishy-washy.  As we currently understand it, empty space is

�lled with a number of all-pervasive, interpenetrating �elds.  To a physicist, these
�elds are mathematical objects: they are functions that take a particular value (or
vector of values) at every point in space.  But for the daydreamer (which, of
course, includes those same physicists), these �elds can be visualized as something
like a stretchy fabric, or a �uid.  To be concrete with the imagery, let’s say that a
�eld is something like the surface of a pond.  When not perturbed, that surface is
placid (as long as you don’t look too closely, say, at the molecular level).  But
when something disturbs the pond, it creates a ripple that propagates stably across
the surface.
 Artistic photograph of an electron

In the modern view of physics, what we call “particles” are really just ripples
across a �eld.  The word electron, for example, is what we use to refer to a ripple
on the electron �eld.  The photon is just a ripple on the photon �eld (also called
the electromagnetic �eld).  And so on.  For each of the elementary particles there
is a corresponding �eld upon which that particle is a ripple.  It is these �elds (and
they alone) that de�ne the properties of the universe: what kind of particles can
exist in the universe, and how they interact with each other.

Just to belabor the point a little more: a particle like an electron is not any more
“fundamental” or “elementary” than a wave lapping the shore of a beach.  It is the
sea that is fundamental.  If you want to understand where waves come from and
how they move, you must �rst understand the water.

(Aside: If you are encountering for the �rst time this idea of �elds as the
fundamental objects of the universe, I hope that it bothers you.  I hope that it
makes you feel uncomfortable and a little incredulous.  That’s certainly the way I
felt at �rst, and for me those feelings were the beginning of my ability to
appreciate an idea that has come to feel deeply wondrous, and deeply useful.  If
you do indeed feel unhappy with this idea, all I can suggest is time and perhaps
the wonderful essay about �elds (classical and quantum) by the great Freeman
Dyson.)

With that pictorial overview, let’s return to the Coulomb interaction.  What I want
to claim is that the Coulomb force, like any other force, is an emergent property of
the �eld that mediates it (in this case, the electromagnetic �eld).  And so, if the
force between two charged particles is to be properly understood, then it must be
explained in terms of how the �eld behaves in the vicinity of those two charged
particles.  From the resulting picture of a perturbed �eld one should be able to see,
in a quantitative way, that Coulomb’s law emerges.

Let’s start with the basics.

Coulomb’s law, as it is usually written, says that the strength of the force F
between two charges q1 and q2 separated by a distance r is

F = (1/4πϵ0 )q1 q2 /r2 .                                                      (1)

(You can think that the term at the beginning of the equation, 1/4πϵ0 , as just a
constant conversion factor that turns the nebulous units of “charge” into
something that has units of force.  But I’ll say a little more this factor in a bit.)

To see how the Coulomb force arises from the properties of a �eld, it makes sense
to �rst talk about the electric �eld created by a single charge.  For this we can
invoke the second piece of canonical knowledge related to point charges, which
says that the strength E of the electric �eld around a point charge q1 follows

E = q1 /r2 .                                                      (2)

This electric �eld points radially outward (for positive charges) or inward (or for
negative charges) from the position of the charge.
 You probably saw a picture like this in high school physics.

At �rst sight, this equation looks essentially identical to the previous one: the only
di�erence is that there is only one q in it instead of two. In fact, high school
classes tend to explain the idea of electric �eld in a way that makes you question
why it needs to exist as a separate concept from force.  I think my high school
physics class, like many others, literally de�ned an electric �eld as “the force that
would be felt by a unit charge if it were placed at a particular location.”)  In this
sense the concept of electric �eld often sounds subsidiary to the concept of force. 
But if you’re prepared instead to think about the �eld as a truly fundamental
object, then this second equation becomes quite interesting.

In our analogy, the electromagnetic �eld is something like a �uid that �lls all of
space.  This �uid exists at every point in space and at every moment in time, but
at moments and locations where there are no charges around you can imagine that
it is stationary and calm.  In the presence of electric charges, however, the �uid
starts to move.  What we normally call the electric �eld strength, or (perhaps
confusingly) just the electric �eld, can be imagined as the local velocity of the �uid
at a particular point.

What emerges from equation (2), then, is a picture of how the �uid is moving in
the vicinity of a point charge.  For a positive charge, for example, it moves radially
outward, in such a way that the speed of the �uid falls of as the square of the
distance from the center.  As it happens, this inverse square law is special: it
guarantees that the total amount of �uid �owing across any closed surface
containing the point charge is the same, regardless of the shape or size of the
surface.  What’s more, the �uid �ow rate is directly proportional to the charge q1 .

The simple way to see this is by drawing a sphere of radius R around the point
charge.  The �ow rate of water across the surface is equal to the product of the
“velocity” E times the area of the sphere.  Since the surface area of a sphere is
proportional to R2 , and the velocity is inversely proportional to R2 , the �ow rate
of water is the same for any sized-sphere and is proportional to the charge inside. 
This is basically just a restatement of Gauss’s law.

All this is to say that, in our �uid analogy, the (positive) point charge is something
like a spout of water or a hose: �uid comes �ying out of it in all directions.  This
�uid is fast moving at the source, and slower as it spreads out. It is not created or
destroyed anywhere except at the point charge itself.  Conversely, a negative point
charge is something like the opposite of a hose: a suction source or drain that pulls
water into itself.  In both cases, the total �ow rate of water (either sprayed out or
sucked in) is quanti�ed by what we call the charge, q.
 Schematic picture of a positive charge…

…and a negative charge.

This analogy might strike you as perhaps a little too precious, but it turns out to
give an intuition that works at a surprisingly quantitative level.  In particular, the
analogy gets quite good when you ask the question “how much energy is there in
the �eld?”

When �uid is in motion, it has kinetic energy.  You may remember from high
school physics that an object with mass m and velocity v⃗ has kinetic energy
m|v⃗| 2 /2.  For a �uid, where di�erent locations have di�erent velocities, you can
generalize this formula by integrating over di�erent locations:

(kinetic energy of fluid) = ∫ 1

2
ρ|v⃗| 2 dV .         (3)

Here, the symbol ∫ … dV means an integral over all di�erent parts of space, and
ρ is the density of the �uid.

As it turns out, the expression for the energy stored in an electric �eld looks
almost exactly the same:

(energy stored in an electric field) = ∫ 1

ϵ |E⃗ |2 dV
2 0
.  (4)

By comparing the last equations, you can see that the value of the electric �eld, E⃗ ,
really is playing the same role as the �uid velocity.  That constant ϵ0 in equation
(4) is a special constant called the permittivity of free space.  In our analogy, you
can think of it as something related to the “density of �uid” in the electromagnetic
�eld.

You can also notice that the quantity 1

ϵ |E⃗ |2
2 0
is an energy density.  It tells you how
much energy is stored in the electric �eld at a particular location.  For �uids,
energy density is closely related to the concept of pressure: a �uid under high
pressure has a lot of energy stored in it.  (You can check, if you want, that energy
per unit volume and pressure have the same physical units.)  We can therefore
think of the quantity 1
ϵ |E⃗ |2
2 0
as something like a pressure that builds up in the
electromagnetic “�uid”.

Having made a correspondence between electric �eld and pressure, the �nal step
toward understanding Coulomb’s law is relatively straightforward.  When two
spouts of water are brought together, pressure builds up between them, and they
are pushed apart.  Similarly, when two electric charges are brought near each
other, pressure builds up in the electric �eld between them.  This pressure ends up
pushing the two charges apart from each other, in the same way that two �re
hoses would be pushed away from each other if you �red them toward each other.

Coulomb’s law describes the force between two garden hoses.

With equations for the “�eld pressure” in-hand, you can even calculate the exact
mathematical form of the repulsive force between the two “hoses”.  If you want
the technical details: you can calculate the pressure at the midplane between the
two, and then integrate the pressure over the midplane area.  (This is the same
procedure that you would follow if you wanted to know the force of a �re hose
spraying against a wall.  Of course, there are other approaches for doing the
calculation.)  What comes out of this procedure is exactly what I promised from
the beginning:

F = (1/4πϵ0 )q1 q2 /r2 .

If you want a conceptual picture for the attractive force between opposite charges,
you can approach it in a similar way.  In particular, when two opposite charges
are brought near each other, this is like bringing a hose that emits water close to a
strong suction hose.  One of the two hoses is furiously emitting �uid, while the
other is happily sucking it in, and consequently the pressure between the two of
them becomes relatively small.  As a result, the two “hoses” end up being pushed
together by the larger pressure of the �uid outside.

At this point, we have a conceptual explanation of where electric forces come

from.  But to close this post, it is perhaps worth making a remark about simplicity
in physics.  It may strike you that the story I have told here is not simple.  I started
with a very simple equation – Coulomb’s law, which is usually introduced as the
simplest quantitative starting point for thinking about electric charges – and I gave
it a complicated origin story.  This story required me to invoke nebulous, space-
�lling force �elds; to make questionable, convoluted analogies; and to compute
multi-dimensional integrals over vector-valued functions.  This story also never
explained why a point charge behaves like a “source” or “sink” of “�uid”; it just
does.  Or, at least, it needs to, if the story is to hold together.

You may reasonably feel, then, that the picture I painted is essentially worthless. 
It is much easier to simply remember equation (1) than to remember how to
describe the way that pressure builds up in a space-�lling, �uid-like �eld.  And it
requires essentially the same number of arbitrary assumptions.

If you feel this way, then probably all I can o�er is an apology for wasting your
time.  But for a physicist, the construction of such “origin stories” is perhaps the
very most important part of the profession.  It is absolutely integral to physics that
its developers never be satis�ed with any level of description of reality.  To every
law or equation or theorem, we must always ask “yes, but why is it that way?”
 This impertinent questioning, where it succeeds, ultimately always turns one
question into another question.  But along the way it can rewrite very
fundamentally the way we perceive nature.  And, when those revisions succeed,
they pave the way for signi�cant new insights and discoveries while recapitulating
all the results that came before.  (For the record, the classical and quantum
theories of �elds are probably the most successful scienti�c theories that mankind
has yet produced.)
You can also view the question of simplicity another way.  In telling this story, I
have not been particularly simple, but nature has been very simple indeed.  It has
provided an extremely succinct mathematical law and allowed it to govern the
universe over more than 20 orders of magnitude in scale.  Perhaps the greatest
proof of Nature’s simplicity is not that I can write Coulomb’s law in a single line,
or that I can give it a particular origin story, but rather that I can think about it in
many di�erent ways and derive it through many di�erent avenues, and all of
those avenues turn out to be equivalent.

I’ll leave you with the words of Richard Feynman, who expressed this same
sentiment very nicely in his Nobel lecture:

The fact that electrodynamics can be written in so many ways … was

something I knew, but I have never understood. It always seems odd to
me that the fundamental laws of physics, when discovered, can appear
in so many di�erent forms that are not apparently identical at �rst,
but, with a little mathematical �ddling you can show the relationship.
… I don’t know why this is – it remains a mystery, but it was
something I learned from experience. There is always another way to
say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it
before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a
representation of the simplicity of nature. A thing like the inverse
square law is just right to be represented by the solution of Poisson’s
equation, which, therefore, is a very di�erent way to say the same
thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t
know what it means, that nature chooses these curious forms, but
maybe that is a way of de�ning simplicity. Perhaps a thing is simple if
you can describe it fully in several di�erent ways without immediately
knowing that you are describing the same thing.

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About Brian Skinner

Brian Skinner is a physicist who specializes in the theory of strongly-
interacting many-body systems. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher
at MIT, and he blogs at Gravity and Levity

Comments

Drew says:
June 23, 2015 at 12:13 pm

In the hose analogy, where the “charges” are opposite, I can understand
why the emitter would be drawn to the suction, because the pressure of the �uid is
lower in that direction than in the background to the other side. But for the suction,
why should it be drawn toward the emitter, rather than being drawn toward the
lower-pressure background to the opposite side?

Brian says:
June 23, 2015 at 12:52 pm

Drew,
It becomes a little di�cult (for me, at least) to explain these things in a purely visual
way. The best I can say at this level is that the pressure really is lower in between the
emitter and the suction hose than it is on either side. You can see this by writing the
�eld at any spatial location as the sum of the �elds created by the two charges
separately.

But there is probably an easier, and more fundamental, way to think about these
forces. Namely, instead of thinking about pressures, you can think about the total
energy stored in the �eld (integrated across all of space). The force between the two
particles is related to the this total energy in a very speci�c way. In particular, the
force always drives the particles in the direction that most rapidly reduces the total
energy of the universe. (I blogged about this idea once here:
https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2010/01/30/the-universe-is-a-giant-energy-
minimization-machine/ )

From this perspective it is quite clear that both the emitter and the suction must be
drawn toward each other, because this reduces the total energy of the �eld in the
fastest way. When the two are collapsed right on top of each other (the emitter
expelling its water directly into the suction hose), the �eld energy is reduced to zero.

It is also a general property that emerges from the �eld description that all forces
must come in equal and opposite pairs. In other words, Nature has no “forces”, but
only pairwise “interactions”. This is a nice property to emerge, since Isaac Newton
recognized this feature of the universe in the 17th century.

scout says:
June 23, 2015 at 6:13 pm

It’s kind of hard for me to imagine how two negative “suction” charges
would cause pressure between them to push them apart, it seems like they would be
drawn towards each other.

Bevan says:
June 23, 2015 at 7:10 pm

This is the same analogy issue the previous post had, only stated
di�erently.

The di�erence between a negative charge and a suction hose is that the negative
charge will preferentially “suck towards” the area of greatest density. A high
density region will therefore “pull” at the charge, while it will movc away from a
low density region (like that produced by another negative charge).

Unrelated, in college I was forced to memorize the permittivity of free space… and
did so with the following tune:
There she was, just a-walkin down the street
singing eight point eight �ve picoFarads per meter
Snappin her �ngers and shu�in her feet
singing eight point eight �ve picoFarads per meter

The charge in!

Is the �ux out!
The charge in is the �ux out!
The charge in is the �ux out!

Brian says:
June 23, 2015 at 8:53 pm

Yeah, maybe this is tricky to visualize, since my idealized isotropic

suction hose isn’t quite the same thing as a real suction hose. But, like Bevan
said, in this idealization the hose is always attracted to the direction where the
water is �owing at it most swiftly. This is clearly the direction opposite the
other suction hose, since in the space between them they compete for water.

By the way, I’m pretty impressed that someone created a song to memorize the
vacuum permittivity. I have a tendency to just use “theorist units” where 4 \pi
\epilson_0 = 1.

Jay says:
June 24, 2015 at 10:36 am

This is a fairly good description of the quantum mechanical view of empty

space. The really curious thing is that the relativistic view of empty space is
completely unlike this description, yet both theories are (within the limits of current
science to discern such things) correct.

Brian says:
June 24, 2015 at 11:45 am

It is remarkable, right? I am really only seriously trained in thinking

about slow-moving things at the smaller-than-a-planet scale, so I can’t claim to
have a �rm understanding of relativity. But I think what you’re saying is at the
heart of our failure (so far) to make a theory of quantum gravity. The two
theories, both fantastically successful, can’t agree on what empty space looks like.

By the way, the picture I painted in this article is essentially completely classical.
The quantumness comes in when you start thinking about the motion of this �uid
at the very small scale, and you realize that at such small scales it must be roiling
and turbulent, without a well-de�ned local velocity at all.
But that is probably best left for a di�erent discussion.

Venkat says:
June 24, 2015 at 11:50 am

” The quantumness comes in when you start thinking about the

motion of this �uid at the very small scale, and you realize that at such small
scales it must be roiling and turbulent, without a well-de�ned local velocity at
all.”

This is the Dirac Sea concept you’re talking about, right? Along with an
application of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle to conclude that it must be
“roiling and turbulent”?

Excuse my ignorance if I am groping here. Memories of long-forgotten physics

classes and half-remembered pop-science explanations of the vacuum.

Brian says:
June 24, 2015 at 6:37 pm

The idea of the Dirac sea is certainly related, but I think that the
concept I am referring to can be more directly described as vacuum
�uctuations. In the picture I painted above of the electromagnetic �eld, the
“water” is placed when no charges are around. But this isn’t exactly true. In
fact, once you apply the rules of quantum mechanics to the �eld itself, you
realize that there must be spontaneous �uctuations of the “water velocity”
happening at every conceivable scale. In particular, there is one quantum of
energy for every possible oscillation mode. At large scales, such �uctuations
are essentially not detectable, because the amount of energy in one quantum
varies inversely with the wavelength of the mode, and it is spread out over a
large volume. But at very short length scales, these �uctuations get very
energetic and can have a big in�uence.

(Relating back to the Dirac sea, you can, if you want, describe vacuum
�uctuations as short-lived electrons rising spontaneously out of the Dirac sea
before falling quickly back again. This, as it turns out, is an equivalent
language. But it is not generally the one I prefer.)

Vacuum �uctuations, by the way, occasionally show up very directly as

measurable forces or energy shifts. For example, in the Casimir e�ect:
https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/10/09/being-pushed-around-
by-empty-space-the-casimir-e�ect/
or the Lamb shift:
https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/the-lamb-shift/

Sorry, everyone, for all the technical jargon in this comment.

Venkat says:
June 25, 2015 at 7:27 pm

Got it. Kinda. Feel educated up from unknown-unknown to

known-unknown now.

Technical jargon is great :D

IMO, non-tech jargon often just obscures things for those who can follow
the technical jargon without illuminating things any better for those who
can’t.

Uncanny valley of science exposition.

Ryan says:
July 20, 2015 at 12:18 pm

“By the way, the picture I painted in this article is essentially

completely classical. The quantumness comes in when you start thinking about
the motion of this �uid at the very small scale, and you realize that at such
small scales it must be roiling and turbulent, without a well-de�ned local
velocity at all.”

Your article and especially this comment are the best conceptualization of
quantum mechanics ever produced. I say that with absolutely no authority
whatsoever.

I ask the following with hopes prepared to be crushed, beyond the analogy to
 the turbulent �ow of the �eld �uid making a bunch of non-smooth �ow seem
smoothed out, is there also an analogy to laminar �ow or the Reynolds
Number?

Brian says:
July 20, 2015 at 11:59 pm

Hi Ryan,
Thanks for the (excessively) complimentary comment. I’ve never encountered
a good analogy to the Reynolds number for quantum �elds. But in my next
post I’m going to focus on what a quantum �eld looks like, and hopefully the
image of the “turbulence” in the �eld will get sharper.

Anthony Di Franco says:

June 27, 2015 at 10:48 pm

So between this and the pilot-wave stu� for quantum mechanics, do we

get our ether back?

pebird says:
June 28, 2015 at 8:51 am

So the aether does exist!

Markus says:
June 29, 2015 at 1:04 am

Great explanation, thank you, Brian

Regarding the hose/drain metaphor, I �nd it powerful in combination with the other
metaphor used elsewhere of bowling balls on a stretched linen, with positive balls
resting on one side and negative on the other.
Then the attract/dispel behaviour becomes more intuitively understandable for
someone challenged in higher math, like me

Brian says:
June 29, 2015 at 10:45 pm

Thanks for the kind words, everyone.

I suppose it’s fair to say that a certain kind of aether has been restored to physics.
But this time, we have learned not to insist on any particular physical form of it. In
other words, it’s best to think that these �elds are what physical things are made of,
and that they are not themselves made of physical things.

Even more importantly, we have learned to insist that our aether obey the laws of
general relativity.

Anthony Di Franco says:

July 1, 2015 at 1:12 am

So what’s a good ether that obeys relativity? Any hope in the cellular
automata ideas? What are the physicists talking about along these lines?

Brian says:
July 2, 2015 at 8:19 am

Personally, I haven’t heard a reputable physicist insist that the

“ether” is something other than a mathematical object that obeys, by de�nition,
the laws of general relativity. (Also, a reputable physicist won’t generally call it
the ether; that word is associated with too many bad memories.)

I also haven’t encountered anyone who takes seriously Stephen Wolfram’s

cellular automata ideas. I can’t comment on them myself, though, having not
seriously looked at them.
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