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Re: Scotch tape, "Sticky Electrostatics"



On Fri, 20 Feb 1998, John Gastineau wrote:

Take a 20-cm strip of tape, fold the last cm over to make a handle, and
stick it to your desk. Smooth it down well.

My vanity demands that I wonder aloud: might this have propagated from my
original "sticky electrostatics" science museum handout from ten years
ago, or did somebody else come up with the same thing independantly? I
know that the handout travelled quite a bit for my never having publishing
it. It spread around the science museum community, and finally saw print
in the lab manual for Conceptual Physics. The current, greatly bloated
version is on my electrostatics page at:

http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/emotor/statelec.html

I created the original demo in order to fight the widespread misconception
that "static electricity" is caused by friction. (As opposed to being
caused by contact, as in "contact electrification"). I was doing K-6
textbook consulting at the time, and found that the authors had great
difficulty accepting that "static electricity" could be caused by simple
contact. All the books (and most encyclopedias) state that "frictional
electricity" is from friction. Who did I think I was, to be saying that
all those books were wrong, and that "triboelectricity" was even misnamed?
But charge-separation in dissimilar insulators is akin to contact
potential in dissimilar metals, diode drop in semiconductors, and
half-cell potential in chemical batteries. I saw this "frictional" idea
as disrupting the beautiful unity of basic electrical physics. The
tape-peeling demo was just the thing to shake their confidence. The
two-pair-of-strips version was a quick & simple way to show charge
conservation and attraction/repulsion electrostatic forces. A string and
sticky tape experiment that's so simple, it doesn't even need any string.

If this really did come from that original demo, then I guess I did by
accident what I recently have tried to do intentionally: send out an
"engineered meme" into the field where it will battle one of the
information virii that causes "popular science misconception" disease.

Ya gotta admit that the "Static Electricity Is Caused By Friction"
misconception has extreme difficulty finding a mental niche in a person
who has been innoculated by the "sticky electrostatics" demo.

Back in 1987 I also had been attempting to convince people to stop saying
"frictional electricity," and to instead call it "contact
electrification." Look how well that worked! ;) "Language engineering"
takes an act of congress or something. But a good demo can infect the
world.


((((((((((((((((((((( ( ( ( ( (O) ) ) ) ) )))))))))))))))))))))
William J. Beaty SCIENCE HOBBYIST website
billb@eskimo.com www.eskimo.com/~billb
EE/programmer/sci-exhibits science projects, tesla, weird science
Seattle, WA 206-781-3320 freenrg-L taoshum-L vortex-L webhead-L