Why does positive attract negative

Be careful not to touch the water. With your team, work together to try and move the pop can using only charged balloons no touching the can with the balloons! Roll out a measuring tape on the floor. How far can you get your can to move before the balloon loses its charge? Extensions Do you push or pull the can with the balloon? Use the triboelectric series table to deduce the movement of electrons between your hair and the balloon, then between the balloon and the can.

Draw a picture showing the relative location of the electrons on each. Hand out a mixed pile of salt and pepper and challenge students to separate the two. Salt is heavier than pepper, so holding a charged balloon over the pile will result in the pepper flying up and sticking to the balloon.

If you move closer to the pile, the salt will eventually fly up too, so move slowly to get the best separation! Extend the water activity by investigating more variables. Does the temperature of the water affect how much it bends? Does a bigger balloon make the water bend more? How does the strength of the stream flow affect how much it bends? Create a mini race between two groups by challenging them to move their pop can from a starting line to a finish line first.

The distance to travel should be about 30 cm i. The force is not gravitational, nor is anything pushing or pulling on the clothing. What we are doing in the chapter on electrostatics is to peel away another layer of the phenomena that surround to gain a better understanding of the world. When we looked at falling objects for instance, we first simply described their motion. Then we looked for the reason these objects fall and gave it the name gravitational force.

We never investigated whether certain objects have a quality that causes them to be attract or attract other objects.

This is, however, what we are doing now. We are investigating charges more, because a lot of chemistry is based on them.

In class we did an experiment with Scotch tape that let us to conclude that there are different charges that cause objects to either attract or repel. These charges are labeled positive and negative.

Then there is a third type of object that is attracted to either positive or negative charges. Since most other objects, unless they are charged before, belong to this third group they are called neutral. All electric fields begin on a positive charge and end on a negative charge. If two positive charges interact, their forces are directed against each other. This creates a repellent force as shown in the illustration.

The same occurs with two negative charges, because their respective forces also act in opposite directions. The electric field and resulting forces produced by two electrical charges of the same polarity.