In: Physics
If you go to a crafts store and buy “glitter beads,” you get a little plastic tube of tiny, metal covered glass or plastic beads. On a nice dry day, you can get a charge on the beads, and some of them will “hover” in the air inside the tube, maybe 4 mm apart from each other. It’s pretty cool.
A. To make it even more cool, let’s estimate how much charge there is on a bead. For that, let’s just assume there are only two beads, one under the other, and it’s the electrostatic repulsion that’s holding the top bead up. If the beads are 4 mm apart, they each have a mass of about 0.1 grams, and we can assume they have the same charge, about how much is that charge?
B. If the amount of the charge on the beads were to drop by 1/2, what would you expect to happen to the distance between them?
C. And how much of a difference in the mass of a bead does that amount of accumulated charge make? That is, how much more or less mass does a charged bead have than a neutral one?