Extra: Why can’t we figure out static electricity?
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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.
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.
Okay, and so when you say charge, when you say this thing is charged, do you mean it has more electrons, or does it mean that electrons are going in a particular direction? Like, when you say it's charged after being touched, what do you mean by that?
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.
Oh, okay. So you have no idea what the direction flow is. I mean, can it be both at the same time?
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.
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