Hello everyone.
This is my first post here, so sorry if I'm asking in the wrong place.
I am an Electrical Engineer form Brazil and I discoverd this site http://amasci.com/ele-edu.html a while back and since then it's been a great source of knowledge and gut understanding of electrical phenomena.
One very thing I always wanted to know and couldn't figured it out up to now, is this:
If you have two bodies charged up, like when you scuff your shoe on a carpet, one of them will aquire electrons from the other and hence be negatively charged and the other positively charged.
Ok, so far so good. Then we say that the person is "charged up" and when this person sticks his finger to a metal objetc (don't know why it has to be metal, first question) there is a flow of electrons from the person to this metal objetc. But now is my question:
Back there in the begining, how the carpet regaind or gave up its lost or aquired electrons.
I mean this information is not showed on books and I have tried to find an explanation online but I couldn't.
It is like the explanation from lightning.
We are told that the base of the cloud is negatively charged and the top is positively charged. When the lightning happens, the excess of electrons from the base goes down to the earth.
Ok, but what happened to the positively charged top?
And why, doesn't the negatively base canceled out with the positively top in the first place?
Could anybody help me with those?
Thank you.
This is my first post here, so sorry if I'm asking in the wrong place.
I am an Electrical Engineer form Brazil and I discoverd this site http://amasci.com/ele-edu.html a while back and since then it's been a great source of knowledge and gut understanding of electrical phenomena.
One very thing I always wanted to know and couldn't figured it out up to now, is this:
If you have two bodies charged up, like when you scuff your shoe on a carpet, one of them will aquire electrons from the other and hence be negatively charged and the other positively charged.
Ok, so far so good. Then we say that the person is "charged up" and when this person sticks his finger to a metal objetc (don't know why it has to be metal, first question) there is a flow of electrons from the person to this metal objetc. But now is my question:
Back there in the begining, how the carpet regaind or gave up its lost or aquired electrons.
I mean this information is not showed on books and I have tried to find an explanation online but I couldn't.
It is like the explanation from lightning.
We are told that the base of the cloud is negatively charged and the top is positively charged. When the lightning happens, the excess of electrons from the base goes down to the earth.
Ok, but what happened to the positively charged top?
And why, doesn't the negatively base canceled out with the positively top in the first place?
Could anybody help me with those?
Thank you.