Jonathan McRae

Okay.

Right, because otherwise you'd be getting a lightning storm every time you walk down the beach.

Yeah.

If you are trying to measure the movement of electrons or ions from one thing to another, you can't touch the thing because then you're messing up your experiment.

With a spell?

Or how do you do that?

Sorry, just for a second, on a side note, I know it's not the relevant point, but like, is it a very loud sound or is it a very sharp sound?

Could we hear it?

Would we damage our ears?

So you're using sound to levitate this piece of quartz to be able to measure the charge from one piece of quartz to another piece of identical quartz, which theoretically...

shouldn't release any charge because they're both neutrally charged.

And therefore, because they're made of the same thing, there shouldn't be any transfer.

Is that what you're saying?

Why would that be?

Right, because if they were absolutely identical...

had exactly the same neutral charge, so they had no electrons waiting to, you know, extra electrons waiting to find a material to go to, or vice versa, then you should be able to move them around and have no charge whatsoever, but you're seeing some sort of transfer.

So does that sound like maybe the materials are not as pure as they need to be, or is there something else at play?

Right.

So if you theoretically were able to have a complete vacuum, completely perfect spheres of quartz that were levitated and didn't touch the sides, everything was completely pristine, you imagine that charge wouldn't happen.

But it's the fact that these materials can absorb or take molecules from the environment they're in, and that's what the difference is.