Question

Coulomb's law states that the electric force becomes weaker with increasing distance, suppose that instead, the electric force between two charged particles was independent of distance. In this case, would a neutral insulator still be attracted towards the comb.

Answer 1

Coulomb's law stated that the force acting on any particle depends on the charges of the particle, the distance at which the charged particles are placed. It is inversely proportional to the distance and gets weaker as the charges move farther. Even if the force gets independent of the distance, it still depends on the charge of the particle.

Complete step by step answer:
The coulomb's law or the coulomb's inverse-square law, states that the magnitude of electrostatic force of attraction or repulsion between two-point charges is directly proportional to the product of the magnitudes of charges and is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the two charged particles. The force of attraction decreases and gets weaker as the charges get away from each other.
In the above question, we were told that, if the electric force between two bodies gets independent of the distance between the two charged bodies, the electric force is still dependent on the charges of the two bodies or objects. If a neutral insulator is brought towards a comb, it doesn’t get affected with the comb because the electric force is independent of distance but the charge is still dependent. Therefore, the neutral insulator won’t get attracted towards the comb. It doesn’t have any charge and there won’t be any force acting between them.

Note:
In the above question, if we were also told that the electric force gets independent of the charge but not the distance, then we can easily say that the neutral insulator will get attracted to the comb placed at some finite distance.