New data zap views of static electricity - Charges build up due to exchange of material, study...

A balloon rubbed against the head can be both a hair-raising and a hair-tearing experience, a new study suggests. Clumps of balloon and hair invisible to the naked eye may break off each object during contact and stick to the other.

The existence of this exchange could challenge traditional theories about how static electricity builds up, a process known as contact electrification.

“The basic assumptions people have made about contact electrification are wrong,” says Bartosz Grzybowski, a physical chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. He and his colleagues describe their new take on static electricity online June 23 in Science.

It’s long been known that some insulators — materials that don’t conduct electricity — build up charge when rubbed together. One object is usually assumed to pick up positive charges uniformly distributed across its surface, while the other picks up negative charges. Where these charges come from isn’t known for sure, though some experiments point to the movement of charged particles such as electrons or ions.

Working within this framework, many scientists have rubbed together different insulators and ranked them from those with the greatest tendency to turn positive, such as wool, to those that tend to go negative, such as Teflon. Materials farther apart on this “triboelectric series” are thought to be more able to charge each other, setting up the kind of situation that can end with a shock.

Last year, though, Grzybowski’s team showed that identical pieces of polymer can charge each other when touched. Now they’ve use a technique called Kelvin force microscopy to take a closer look at various polymers brought into contact. The surface of each object, they discovered, was not simply positive or negative — but coated by an intricate quilt of...

(Thank you for the response. I value your questions and arguments, more actually than the bullcrap I am spouting.)

Yes, we know that charges need to balance, but why is that? .... Saying that the ‘positive and negative charges have to balance out’...

I should have said they TRY to balance out.

What exactly is a charge? You can say, ‘well it's what occurs when there is a differential accumulation of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ particles, but how does any particle, electrons, protons, or whatever, have a ‘charge’?

How? Unknown territory, I guess. Why? Because matter doesn't usually achieve a zero balance. Protons, and electrons have a charge because it apparently fits into the design plan where the charge controls the number of a particle that can (bonded/attached/orbiting) other particles like the nucleus.

There is no mathematical formula, to my knowledge, that can explain this.

Well, there is the one that is used to determine how many electrons, protons, etc, can orbit around a nucleus, but it doesn't explain how.

Millikan could do his oil drop experiment (his grandson lived with a previous mentor of mine), and gives us some information about electrons, but we still have no idea what makes them attracted to protons, but repelled by other electrons.

Electromagnetic force, based on electrical charge. Positive charge repels, negative attracts.

And I am sure there is a lot more to it, and much more we don't, and may never, understand.

I may even be completely wrong.

We’re not alone in our skepticism:

“I must admit, it astounds me how some scientists can be so sure of theories which involve events in the distant past that we cannot measure directly. Yet we measure the entire Earth every day with a variety of satellite instruments, and we are still trying to figure out from that abundance of data how today’s climate system works!”

http://www.drroyspencer.com/

Second article down, “Understanding James Hansen’s View of Our Climate Future,” about the ninth paragraph

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