1. The Electric Field

Long before Star Trek, Michael Faraday (1791-1867) came up with the idea of an electric "field of force." James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79) saw that field as the space around an electrified object.

Daniel Fleisch, my superb guide for these forty days, describes an electric field as "the electrical force per unit charge exerted on a charged object" (3). So you might think of it as the number of newtons of electrical force on each coulomb of charge at a location.

So here's the relationship:

The electric field, a vector is the electric force per charge. You might think of a field as a series of imaginary electric lines that originate on a positive charge and terminate in the negative charge. The net electric field at any point is the vector sum of all electric fields at that point. Electric field lines never cross. Electric field lines are perpendicular to the surface of the conductor.