Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Future Proof Extra with Jonathan McRae. Proudly supported by Research Ireland on Newstalk. Welcome back to Future Proof on Newstalk. I'm Jonathan McRae. Now, if you've been listening to this program at all over the last 15 years, you'll know that electricity is not my strong point. But static electricity is just about simple enough for me to get my head around.
We all understand that if I rub a balloon against my hair, charge will be exchanged and the balloon will stick to things afterwards because of the difference. Now, I'm just reading this from a script. I don't understand it. We're going to have to start with the very beginnings. But it's quite interesting, actually.
Chapter 2: What is static electricity and why is it confusing?
Scott Y. Toukaitis is assistant professor at the Institute of Science and Technology in Austria in Klosterneuberg. Klosterneuberg, sorry. That is quite the title, Scott. You're very welcome. Let's start off, because actually static electricity is not as simple as people might think. But I really struggle with everything when it comes to electricity. It seems like magic to me.
What happens when I get an electric shock?
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.
Okay, so to stop there, because you're going to have to hold my hand all the way through this, I'm afraid. So when you say we get charged, so I'm rubbing my feet against the carpet right now. What is happening that's charging me up? I'm absorbing electrons?
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.
When you say electrically neutral, do you mean everyone is born, like, you know, when you're born sterile, like everyone is born electrically neutral or we remain electrically neutral until a certain point?
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.
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Chapter 3: How does rubbing my feet on the carpet charge me?
We study piezoelectricity to see if fabrics can generate and store electricity. Why do we not know how static electricity works?
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.
So tell me about your research and why understanding this might be useful.
Yeah, so we do a very funny thing, which is we study when identical materials exchange charge. So at least if you do a balloon and hair, you say, okay, they're different. Something's different about them. Therefore, charge should go in one direction. But what we study is two identical materials.
They're as identical as you can possibly make them, and yet charge still flows between them when they touch, and typically charge flows in one direction. And this is interesting because in nature, there are a lot of systems of identical materials that collide a lot and get really charged. So a good example is if you have a dust storm, say in the Sahara, most of those sand particles are quartz.
And yet they collide and bounce and rub all over each other in these sandstorms. And you can actually have lightning in the sandstorm because they're getting so charged. The same thing happens in volcanic eruptions. So you can find beautiful images online of lightning during volcanic eruptions. Same thing happens on the surface of Mars.
So it was actually just shown a few weeks ago that there's lightning on Mars from Martian dust storms. And this is interesting, too, because on Earth, it's thought that the first kind of primordial chemicals for life were made from electrostatic discharges. And so if there is the kind of soup of life on Mars, it's probably because of static electricity.
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