Scott Waitukaitis

And this is kind of a funny thing.

So when you think of doing a static electricity experiment, you think of balloon, you think of glass, you think of plastic.

And these are all materials that are horrible.

electrical conductors yeah so they're materials where the inside the material charge does not move easily at all and yet when you touch them together they exchange a lot of charge and you know for example when you think of rubbing two things together to see static electricity you don't think of running you know rubbing two metal forks together even though metals are great electrical conductors so yeah materials matter and it's counterintuitive the ones that

exchange charge the best on contact are actually the insulators, not the electrical conductors.

It actually, it holds charge extremely well.

So what happens is you take the balloon and the hair, they touch.

Some little charge, again, we don't know the identity, decides to jump over.

And now the balloon has one charge, say negative, and the hair positive.

And actually, on the insulators, the charge tries to stay put where it was deposited.

But of course, like I said, over time, maybe an opposite charge from the air comes in to discharge it, or maybe the charge slowly moves on the surface to discharge it.

But those are pretty slow processes compared to the contact.

The contact can happen in a second, and those other processes can take days and even weeks.

I mean, I could go into this for a long time, but, you know, historically, the study of all electricity started with static electricity.

And, you know, like Coulomb and all of these great physicists from the, you know, 15 and 1600s were really focused on why, when I touch two materials together, do they exchange charge?

Eventually, the battery came along, and I attribute a lot of the kind of lack of interest in static electricity to the battery because it gave a way for people to charge stuff without rubbing it together.

Now, Zoom's in the future, and what's happened in the last hundred years is, you know, people think this is such an antiquated topic that they assume it must be understood already.

So part of the problem in recent years, you know, last hundred years, is just people think it's already solved, so they don't look into it.

But when you look into it, what you find is we don't know what charge materials exchange when they touch, and we don't know why.

So basically everything's an open, you know, completely open.