

What if I were 1% charged? (2013) - germ13
https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2013/05/22/what-if-i-were-1-charged/

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ChuckMcM
This is a common problem given in first year physics majors. One of the
interesting things is creating an repulsor field that would keep pretty much
any matter outside of it in this way. There was a working (albeit accidental)
example of one at a 3M factory for making tape [1]

[1]
[http://amasci.com/weird/unusual/e-wall.html](http://amasci.com/weird/unusual/e-wall.html)

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wbeaty
Whoa, amasci.com traffic spike!

Heh, wasn't there a Larry Niven SF story where an alien weapon would zero out
the charge of electrons, so the nuclei would fly apart? Our undergrad phys-101
had calculating the force between two (copper!) pennies 1M apart, with all
electrons removed from one and deposited on the other.

Later I realized that it would have been even more impressive to estimate the
energy-equiv of kilotons of TNT which would be released when the meter-long
spark brought the two pennies back into equilibrium.

Another: calculate the width of one coulomb. It's about half a mm, like a
grain of sand. That's assuming its the mobile electrons in copper wire (so,
not Cu's electrons, but just one free electron per atom.)

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TheDauthi
It was actually in a number of his short stories in the Known Space universe:
the slaver disintegrator. I had a physics teacher in high school who gave us
an assignment to describe what the effects of a sci-fi device would actually
be like. The disintegrator was probably the most interesting one of the bunch.

~~~
kordless
The Puppeteers had one too!
[http://news.larryniven.net/concordance/main.asp?alpha=P#Pupp...](http://news.larryniven.net/concordance/main.asp?alpha=P#Puppeteerdisintegrator)

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spenczar5
The author probably came upon this idea from reading Richard Feynman's
_Lectures on Physics_ , in which he says this:

> And all matter is a mixture of positive protons and negative electrons which
> are attracting and repelling with this great force. So perfect is the
> balance however, that when you stand near someone else you don't feel any
> force at all. If there were even a little bit of unbalance you would know
> it. If you were standing at arm's length from someone and each of you had
> one percent more electrons than protons, the repelling force would be
> incredible. How great? Enough to lift the Empire State building? No! To lift
> Mount Everest? No! The repulsion would be enough to lift a "weight" equal to
> that of the entire earth!

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adekok
Alkali metals react in water because of coulomb explosions:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMfQSV4ygHE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMfQSV4ygHE)

The explanation was only discovered this year.

~~~
pdkl95
That's the video from before they published (which is still interesting).
There is also a more recent video[1] (post-publication[2]) that covers how
they got the data (which supports the coulombic explosion hypothesis).

While it is mentioned at the end of the newer video, I highly recommend
watching the 500fps footage[3] of a drop of NaK burning (just before it
explodes) on the top of water. There is a striking color change as it starts
to interact with the water, and right the NaK explodes... the metal turns
_completely transparent_.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmlAYnFF_s8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmlAYnFF_s8)

[2]
[http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/v7/n3/full/nchem.2161.ht...](http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/v7/n3/full/nchem.2161.html)

[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIGMfai_ICg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIGMfai_ICg)

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noobermin
40MC is a lot. Another way to think about it is that a force on the order of
that many tons would be needed to rip out 1% of your electrons from your
neutral body in the first place. That's why we don't see charging up to that
scale in day-to-day life.

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baddox
The example of static electricity holding a balloon up against the Earth's
gravity is a good one. I like it better than the one I always heard, which is
a refrigerator magnet resisting Earth's gravity.

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lutorm
Getting attracted to the ground wouldn't be a problem, since you would already
have exploded due to the repulsion of your constituent parts from each other.
This happens to charged things in nature, and it has a cool name:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coulomb_explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coulomb_explosion)

~~~
thaumasiotes
This is called out in the article, before the attraction to the ground is
mentioned:

> Suppose, for example, that in their rush to escape my body, those 40 million
> Coulombs split in half and flowed to opposite extremities. Say, each hand
> suddenly acquired a charge of 20 million Coulombs. The force between those
> two hands (spread apart, about 6 feet) would be 10^{24} Newtons, which
> translates to about 10^{23} pounds. Needless to say, my body would not
> retain its structural integrity.

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aklein
Reminds me in a weird way of the potato paradox,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_paradox)

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mrfusion
Why isn't there a way to use this principle for energy storage?

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gizmo686
Isn't this what capacitors do?

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mrfusion
But they can't get anywhere near this energy level. Why not make a piece of
metal .xx1% charged and encase it in a big insulator, glass? Seems like it
would be an awesome battery no?

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poizan42
Because we don't know how to make it 0.xx1% charged and keep it that way until
you need the energy.

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mrfusion
How about the van de graf generator?

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dalke
No, a Van de Graaff generator doesn't get anywhere close to 0.xx1% charged.

As the article says, loosing 1% of electrons leads to a voltage potential of
40 exavolts. As
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_de_Graaff_generator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_de_Graaff_generator)
points out, the best a Van de Graaff generator can do is "about 25 megavolts"
due to "arcing and corona discharge."

The sequence is mega-, giga-, tera-, peta-, exa-. That corresponds to
0.000,000,000,000,1% charge, though you should double check me as I'm not used
to working with that many powers of ten.

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diminish
Now the question is how much energy is needed to extract 1% of your
electrons... Making a Coulomb bomb shouldn't be that easy.

~~~
dalke
As energy is conserved, I would say that it takes a Coulomb bomb's worth of
energy to extract 1% of one's electrons, plus overhead due to inefficiencies.

