Grounding Process: Neutralizing Negatively Charged Objects

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Discussion Overview

The discussion revolves around the grounding process of negatively charged objects and whether this process results in a negative charge on the human body, which acts as the ground. Participants explore the concept of the Earth as an infinite reservoir of charge and the implications of charge transfer during grounding.

Discussion Character

  • Exploratory
  • Conceptual clarification
  • Debate/contested

Main Points Raised

  • One participant questions whether the human body becomes negatively charged after grounding a negatively charged object and why the Earth is referred to as an infinite reservoir.
  • Another participant provides an analogy comparing the grounding process to the release of air from a compressed bottle, suggesting that the atmosphere acts as an infinite reservoir and discussing the negligible effect on external pressure.
  • This participant also notes that the charge on the Earth may not change significantly unless it was already positively charged, implying that the original state of the Earth's charge is relevant to the discussion.
  • A later post reiterates the question about the body gaining negative charges and introduces the idea that the total charge of everything on Earth is constant, suggesting that discharging an object would make the Earth slightly more negative.

Areas of Agreement / Disagreement

Participants express differing views on whether the grounding process results in a negative charge on the human body and the implications of the Earth's charge state. There is no consensus on these points, and the discussion remains unresolved.

Contextual Notes

Participants reference the charge of the Earth and its implications for grounding, but there are unresolved questions about the exact nature and state of the Earth's charge, as well as the effects of grounding on the human body.

Aya Elsayed
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Let us consider a negatively charged object. We want to neutralize this object, so we touched it by our hands to remove the excess of negative charges by Grounding. Now the question is : Will our body (The Ground) be negatively charged as it gained those negative charges? then why it is called infinite reservoir?
 
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You might consider an analogy of a bottle of compressed air. If you open the bottle, air escapes into the atmosphere until the pressure inside and out is "atmospheric pressure". The atmosphere could be considered the "infinite reservoir " here.

If you were inside a sealed container - say a submarine - when you did this, you'd find the same: air would escape until the pressure inside and outside the bottle was equal to the submarine's internal air pressue.

In either case the flow of air would increase the pressure outside by a tiny amount. For the world atmosphere I think this would be negligible. For the submarine, perhaps it were a very large tank (rather than the pop bottle or beer can I'd thought about) maybe the pressure change would be detectable?

You are correct that your charge goes somewhere, and it changes the potential of the "sink" : just as the object is not completely discharged (in general) but brought to the same potential as the sink.

Whether the ground becomes negatively charged by discharging your object, would depend on it's original state of charge. If the Earth were already charged with positive* megacoulombs, then a few picocoulombs of electrons would not make it become negative.

Edit: on looking into the charge on the Earth, I can't find anything on which 97% of scientists agree, but more seem to say our charge is negative. The magnitude maybe of the order of 0.6 MCb.
 
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Thank you so much! This helped a lot :)
 
Aya Elsayed said:
Let us consider a negatively charged object. We want to neutralize this object, so we touched it by our hands to remove the excess of negative charges by Grounding. Now the question is : Will our body (The Ground) be negatively charged as it gained those negative charges? then why it is called infinite reservoir?
Total charge of everything on Earth is constant. It's usually thought of as zero but I suppose that can be debated. So when you discharge your object the charge on Earth and everything else on/in it does indeed go slightly more negative
 

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