Scott Waitukaitis

It could in principle.

That's possible.

It would be unpleasant if that were true because it'd be much more complicated.

People that work in this topic like to think and hope that it's probably just one species involved, say electrons.

But we don't know because it's easy to see that something is charged and

It's very hard to put a little name tag on those charges and identify what they are.

So you put it on the shelf and let's say it's charged.

Two things will happen.

One is indeed that the air has ions floating around.

And if the balloon is, say, negatively charged, then the positive ions of the air will slowly get drawn to the balloon more than the negative ones to discharge it.

The other thing that happens is every surface has a bit of water on the surface.

And water is a pretty good electrical conductor, at least, you know, when it's mixed with kind of salty things like, you know, natural water is.

And so actually you can have charge also just conduct on the surface until it spreads out over the stuff nearby.

Well, actually, again, in this case, the things that are moving are not electrons.

So in the air, the charges that are around are actually mostly ions.

Okay.

And on the surface where you have the water, water mostly conducts electricity through protons.

What?

It's all pretty complicated, yeah.

Yeah, in general, the material matters.