system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is the effect of electric field extending to infinity like the gravitational field? If no, to what distance do they extend?

I might be terribly wrong but I just thought of this based on Coulomb's Law. The r or radius/distance in the equation could be replaced by any large number and the electric force would still not be zero albeit so low that it's negligible.
gpt
Yes, in theory the electric field has unlimited range. However, there's a fundamental difference between the electric field and the gravitational field and that is the presence of two opposite charge polarities and the mechanism of "screening" that is a result of this.

When it comes to gravity, the "gravitational charge", being mass only comes in positive quantities (as far as we know). But electric charge exists in both positive and negative quantities. Because the electric force causes positive and negative charges to attract each other, a "naked" charge will eventually be surrounded with oppositely charged particles it has attracted and these oppositely charged particles work to "screen" the electric field to the outside world.

So while there's no fundamental limit to the electric field and it follows the same 1/r^2 falloff that gravity does, in reality constant long range electric fields tend to not last indefinitely.