Door handles, taps, playground slides, furry pets… Getting zapped by static electricity is a common experience. But the physics that causes the spark is surprisingly intricate. If you’re getting zapped often, understanding the causes of static may help you avoid at least some of the shocks. What is static electricity? To understand static electricity, we have to peer inside the building blocks of matter: atoms. Every atom has a heavy nucleus in the centre and several electrons that orbit this nucleus. The nucleus itself contains subatomic particles called protons and neutrons. All subatomic particles have intrinsic physical properties, such as…
Author: Niusha Shafiabady, Associate Professor in Computational Intelligence, Australian Catholic University
