
Static Electricity Defies Simple Explanation - zw123456
http://news.sciencemag.org/chemistry/2014/05/static-electricity-defies-simple-explanation
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beloch
Static Electricity is simple in theory, but hard to observe directly. Why? How
do you directly observe electrons moving from surface to surface?

To observe something directly you basically need to bounce stuff off of it and
observe where that stuff goes. e.g. Bouncing hundreds of ping-pong balls off
of a basketball and tracing their trajectories will give you a pretty good
idea of the basketball's outline. We do this all the time just by opening our
eyes and observing light that is scattered/reflected/radiated by the objects
around us. Unfortunately, we start to run into quantum limits when we try to
observe electrons. Observing electrons with photons is like observing that
same basketball by bouncing cannonballs off of it. We can reasonably expect to
hit the basketball and maybe even observe a tiny deflection in the first
cannonball, but the basketball will be _long_ gone before we can fire a second
cannonball and we need several deflections to get even a rudimentary image!
Things only get harder if we want to know things like the basketball's
position and speed! Electrons themselves are one of the preferred tiny things
to bounce off of other tiny things to observe them (e.g. electron microscopy),
but bouncing basketballs off of basketballs doesn't work very well either.
What about quarks you say? Great idea! Or, it would be if quarks were stable
enough to travel even the microscopic distances required. Also, quarks are
charged...

So there you have it. Static electricity is hard to observe directly because
of quantum limits on observation. We can only make indirect observations and
see how well they agree with the theory. On the bright side, there is at least
some hope of detecting the transfer of molecules.

~~~
pdonis
_> What about quarks you say? Great idea! Or, it would be if quarks were
stable enough to travel even the microscopic distances required._

Quarks are stable; the problem is that they're confined. Free quarks can't be
observed; we can only observe bound quark states like protons or pions, which
are much larger than electrons. (Actually, as best we can tell, even if we
could observe free quarks, their masses would be quite a bit larger than the
mass of the electron.)

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dang
Url changed from [http://gizmodo.com/we-still-dont-know-how-static-
electricity...](http://gizmodo.com/we-still-dont-know-how-static-electricity-
works-1579257797), which points to this.

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larrys
Perhaps someone who knows more about this than I do could explain why in this
article it says that static electricity is not a form of energy. But I know
I've see cases where you can get static electricity to light a bulb for a
brief time.

[http://amasci.com/emotor/voltmeas.html](http://amasci.com/emotor/voltmeas.html)

Actually here it is:

[http://www.scientificsonline.com/human-powered-light-
bulb.ht...](http://www.scientificsonline.com/human-powered-light-bulb.html)

~~~
CamperBob2
You can think of static electricity as potential energy, like a brick on a
ledge. If something causes the brick to fall, its potential energy is
converted into kinetic energy. Work can be done when the brick hits something,
but not for long.

Likewise, if something discharges the static electricity, it's not "static"
electricity anymore, but a pulse of current electricity. A limited amount of
work can be done by the kinetic energy represented by the moving charge.

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mullingitover
> Determining which scenario is right may be tough. Repeating the experiment
> under conditions that would eliminate any water would be very difficult,
> Jaeger says.

I wonder how hard it'd be to do this in a vacuum chamber. All the water could
vaporize and get pumped out of the chamber, problem solved?

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thret
Even after reading the article I find the simple explanation quite convincing.

Is the explanation for static electricity from rubbing dissimilar materials
together also not entirely correct?

~~~
mpyne
Well the explanation of an imbalance of charge accumulation causing static
electricity is still simple and correct.

The hard part I think is giving a simple explanation for _why_ rubbing some
materials together causes the charge carriers to preferentially end up on one
of the materials being rubbed.

