Talk: Static electricity

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Removed:

"Any source of high voltage is also a source of static electricity."

Please describe the relationship in more detail before you put it back in. - Omegatron 13:45, Jul 2, 2004 (UTC)

"Any source of high voltage is also a source of static electricity."

Hmm? I thought this fact was obvious. I'm curious, can you tell me WHY you removed it?

"Static electricity" doesn't mean "electricity which is static," instead it relates both to the natural phenomena of surface charge at high voltage, and to the science called Electrostatics. If you scuff across a rug and then zap yourself on a doorknob, your body had been charged to several thousand volts wrt ground just before the spark jumped. If a rubber balloon is charged enough that it can attract lint and small bits of paper, the surface of that balloon is at tens of kilovolts with respect to ground. And "static electricity" machines such as Wimshurst and VandeGraaff generators typically put out 50KV (even up to fractional megavolt.) Yet if these machines are replaced with DC power supplies of the same high voltage, (perhaps with a large-value resistor in series for safety,) nothing changes; we still see the same sparking and the corona discharge and observe attraction/repulsion forces. The source (whether frictional or rectified HV transformer) doesn't matter. In a real sense, "static electricity" means "high voltage"... and does not mean "unmoving charges." If a wire carries ten amps at 50KV, we'll see just as much sparking and corona-glow and lint-attraction as if the wire carried zero amps at 50KV. The presence of flowing charge does not detract from the "static electricity," indicating that "static/unmovingness" has little to do with the phenomenon.