Newton's three laws can be applied to phenomena involving electricity and magnetism, though subtleties and caveats exist.
Coulomb's law for the electric force between two stationary, electrically charged bodies has much the same mathematical form as Newton's law of universal gravitation: the force is proportional to the product of the charges, inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, and directed along the straight line between them. The Coulomb force that a charge {\displaystyle q_{1}}q_{1} exerts upon a charge {\displaystyle q_{2}}q_{2} is equal in magnitude to the force that {\displaystyle q_{2}}q_{2} exerts upon {\displaystyle q_{1}}q_{1}, and it points in the exact opposite direction. Coulomb's law is thus consistent with Newton's third law.[65]
Electromagnetism treats forces as produced by fields acting upon charges. The Lorentz force law provides an expression for the force upon a charged body that can be plugged into Newton's second law in order to calculate its acceleration.[66]: 85 According to the Lorentz force law, a charged body in an electric field experiences a force in the direction of that field, a force proportional to its charge {\displaystyle q}q and to the strength of the electric field. In addition, a moving charged body in a magnetic field experiences a force that is also proportional to its charge, in a direction perpendicular to both the field and the body's direction of motion. Using the vector cross product,