Coulomb's law, developed in the 1780s by French physicist
Charles Augustin de Coulomb, may be stated in
scalar form as follows
If one does not require the specific direction of the force then the simplified, scalar, version of Coulomb's law will suffice. The magnitude of the force on a charge, 
, due to the presence of a second charge, 
, is given by the magnitude of
where 
is the separation of the charges and 
is the electric constant. A positive force implies a repulsive interaction, while a negative force implies an attractive interaction.[1]
The prefactor, termed the electrostatic constant, or Coulomb's constant (
), is
