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There are no electric field lines anywhere inside a hollow conductor – why?

The electric field is zero everywhere inside the hollow conductor, so there are no electric field lines anywhere inside a hollow conductor.

This effect (electric field being zero everywhere inside the hollow conductor) can be explained using the superposition principle.

Fields set up by many sources superpose, forming a single net field. The vector specifying the magnitude of the net field at any point is simply the vector sum of the fields of each individual source.

Anywhere within the interior of a hollow conducting object, the vector sum of all the individual electric fields is zero. For this reason, the person inside the Faraday cage is not affected by the tremendous charges on the outside surface of the cage.

See also  Properties of the Electric field between two oppositely charged parallel plates
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