Published a series of papers on electricity and magnetism in the late 1780s. One was about electrostatic forces and a description of the inverse square law. Coulomb’s law states that the electric force between charged objects inversely depends upon the distance between the objects. That is, like gravity, the electric force acts in a line between two objects and decreases with the square of the distance between them. Coulomb’s law depends upon the charge of the objects involved. When the objects in question are both positively or both negatively charged, the forces between them are repulsive, but attractive forces arise between objects carrying opposing charges.