Scott Waitukaitis

Okay, so when you get an electric shock, what you're actually doing is trying to discharge your static electricity.

But the really weird thing happens is why you get charged in the first place to give that shock.

And so, you know, typically objects are electrically neutral.

They have just as much negative charge as positive charge.

But when you scuffle your feet across the carpet...

You exchange charge with the carpet.

So you get charged up and then you go to, you know, kiss your partner or touch a doorknob and you get a nasty shock.

Well, the truth is we have no idea.

So I can tell you, you know, let's say you start out electrically neutral.

You rub your feet on the carpet.

Yeah, basically, if you have an object that you've left alone, like, say, a balloon that you put on the shelf, and you don't touch that balloon, you don't move it around, you just leave it there, over time, slowly, it will discharge.

It will become electrically neutral.

But as soon as you touch that balloon or rub that balloon,

the contact between the other surface will cause it to exchange charge, so it will become non-neutral again.

And the same thing is going on with your feet, you know, scuffling across the carpet.

It's the contact with the other object, the rubbing, that causes them to exchange charge.

So when it's neutral, it has the same number of electrons and protons.

When it's charged, it means that there's more of one of those than the other.

Now, when two objects touch, and let's say you rub the balloon on your hair and the balloon becomes negatively charged and the hair becomes positively charged, I don't know if that's because the hair gave electrons to the balloon or maybe the balloon gave positive ions to the hair.

We actually don't know even something as simple as that.