(soft tune)
(lively music)
- [Narrator] This program
is brought to you by BASF,
The Chemical Company.
- Hey, welcome to Stuff
to Blow Your Kid's Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb.
- And my name is Julie Douglas
and today we are talking
about static electricity.
- You know static electricity,
you shuffle across a carpeted floor,
you reach out, and you touch a doorknob,
and there's that spark, that shock,
that's static electricity.
- But before we can talk
about static electricity,
we have to talk about atoms.
Now everything we see is made up of atoms
and right here we have representation
of a couple of atoms hanging out.
- Now atoms are composed
of protons, neutrons,
and, most importantly, electrons.
Our representations of the atom
each have some electrons in them.
Mine has two.
- And mine also has two.
Now normally atoms are neutrally charged
and they have the same amount of electrons
and protons and that's what you see here.
- But what happens when these two atoms
rub against each other?
What we have is an electron exchange.
I have an electron that jumps
from this atom to yours,
so now I have a single electron
giving me a positive charge.
You have three, giving
you a negative charge.
- That's right.
So, now our atoms know
that there's an imbalance
and they wanna correct that.
So they're gonna be super
attracted to each other
so that one electron can jump ship
and they're now balanced out.
- Right.
Now we have a neutral charge again.
But what happens if both of these atoms
has an extra electron in play?
- [Julie] Okay, well.
- [Robert] Now there's repulsion
between these two atoms,
they don't wanna touch each other.
- That's right.
They have no business with each other,
they have no electrons to try to exchange,
so that explains repulsion.
So, to look at this a little bit more,
we're going to do a simple
experiment with a balloon
and your hair.
- That's right.
I'm gonna grab a helium balloon here,
but the balloon you use can
just be a normal balloon
filled with air, doesn't matter,
but Julie, if you will take that.
- Oh, with pleasure.
Okay, so you just wanna rub
the hair really, really,
really well, get a lot of static built up,
and then wallah, look at that.
It's pretty great.
I mean, what you have here
is an exchange of those
electrons to Robert's hair and
the reason why Robert's hair
is sticking up so very well
is that now all those little
hairs are positively charged
and they are repulsed, that's
why they're standing on end,
trying to get away from one another.
- So there you have
it, static electricity.
And in our next segment,
we're gonna start to talk
about just how powerful a force
static electricity really is.
In our experiment we were able to observe
how the spark jumps from
a positively charged atom
to a negatively charged atom
and we can actually observe this happening
in the world around us.
If I shuffle across a carpeted floor
and then I reach out
and I touch a doorknob,
the electrons are actually
traveling up from the
negatively charged floor, through my body,
and then jump from my
finger to the doorknob
and I can feel that spark
and if the lights are dimmed,
I can actually see that spark.
And a similar thing actually happens
during an electrical storm in the sky.
- That's right, in the form of lightning
because, it's basically the same process.
What you have is you have a cloud
that has positively charged
particles on the top
and negatively charged
particles on the bottom
and all those particles begin
to collide with each other,
rub up against each other,
and it creates static electricity.
- So the upper portion of the cloud
is essentially the carpet and
the lower portion of the cloud
is the doorknob.
Positive charge, negative charge,
and the electrons want
to flow between the two
but they don't have a human
to bridge these two layers
so what happens is an
electrical field builds up
between positive and
negative and the air ionizes
forging a pathway for the
electricity to flow through.
It builds up, it builds up, it builds up,
and suddenly it breaks, zapping
down through the atmosphere
and connecting these two layers.
- That's right, and boom,
you've got a huge, massive
electrical charge being
delivered to the Earth
and while that may seem instantaneous,
the fact of the matter is
that those charged particles
have been doing a delicate
dance up in the clouds
to create this spectacular
light show for us.
- Wow, so, lightning storms
on Earth are pretty intense,
but what does the rest of
the solar system have for us?
- Okay, take Jupiter and Saturn,
turns out that the lightning
flashes on those planets
were one thousand times more powerful
than the ones we see here on Earth.
- Wow, that is pretty intense,
but have those storms ever kick
started life as we know it?
- Mm, not that we know of.
- There's this amazing theory
and to understand it we
have to travel back close to
four billion years in
the past to an age of
cower and volcanoes and
lifeless tidal pools.
- And with those lifeless tidal pools,
we also have an atmosphere
that is filled with
carbon dioxide, carbon
monoxide, and nitrogen,
which are pretty important elements
when you're trying to
create a recipe for life.
- Those tidal pools are
full of inorganic compounds,
there's nothing living in there at all,
and the atmosphere above
the volcano is crackling
with electrical energy generated
by the volcanic activity.
So, a lightning bolt arches
down through the sky,
hits the tidal pool,
and actually creates the
amino acids that are the building blocks
of life as we know it.
- So you can kind of think
of it as Frankenstein
and almost like bringing
this electricity down
to these elements and animating them
until they eventually
become life here on Earth.
- So when you shuffle across a carpet
and you feel that static buzz
on the tips of your fingers,
that's not only a great
way to shock your sister,
it's the power that may have
shocked life into existence
on this ancient, ancient world.
(upbeat music)
- [Narrator] This program
is brought to you by BASF,
The Chemical Company.
(soft tune)
