Question

Is the electrostatic force always attractive?

Answer 1

Hint: You could define the electrostatic force as the very first step. Then you could give the characteristics that affect this law and also give the quantities between which electrostatic force exists. Then, you could think of whether there exist any such case where this force is not attractive and hence answer the question.

Complete answer:
In the question, we are asked whether electrostatic force is always attractive. In order to answer this question you just need to have basic knowledge on electrostatic force concepts.
Electrostatic force is that force that acts between two charged bodies. You may recall that in the universe we have two types of charges: positive charges and negative charges. Also, we have another universal truth that like charges repel and unlike charges attract. So, the electrostatic force between two positive and negative charges will always be attractive but the electrostatic force between two positive charges and that between two negative charges will always be repulsive.
Therefore, we could make this conclusion that the electrostatic force is not always attractive but it can be repulsive too.

Note:
In order to measure the electrostatic force we use the very famous Coulomb’s law. This is one among those laws that would be by heart for any science student. This law states that the electrostatic force between two charges is proportional to the product of those charges and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Mathematically, this law is given by, (after substituting the proportionality constant)
$F=\dfrac{1}{4\pi {{\varepsilon }_{0}}}\dfrac{{{q}_{1}}{{q}_{2}}}{{{r}^{2}}}$