{"id":149614,"date":"2022-11-06T19:22:30","date_gmt":"2022-11-07T01:22:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/11\/scientists-solve-an-80-year-old-physics-mystery"},"modified":"2022-11-06T19:22:30","modified_gmt":"2022-11-07T01:22:30","slug":"scientists-solve-an-80-year-old-physics-mystery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/11\/scientists-solve-an-80-year-old-physics-mystery","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Solve an 80-Year-Old Physics Mystery"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/scientists-solve-an-80-year-old-physics-mystery2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Contact electrification (CE) was humanity\u2019s earliest and sole source of electricity until about the 18th century, but its real nature remains a mystery. Today, it is regarded as a critical component of technologies such as laser printers, LCD production processes, electrostatic painting, plastic separation for recycling, and more, as well as a major industrial hazard (damage to electronic systems, explosions in coal mines, fires in chemical plants) due to the electrostatic discharges (ESD) that accompany CE. A 2008 study published in <em>Nature<\/em> found that in a vacuum, ESDs of a simple adhesive tape are so powerful that they generate enough X-rays to take an X-ray image of a finger.<\/p>\n<p>For a long time, it was believed that two contacting\/sliding materials charge in opposing and uniform directions. However, after CE, it was discovered that each of the separated surfaces carries both (+) and (-) charges. The formation of so-called charge mosaics was attributed to experiment irreproducibility, inherent inhomogeneities of contacting materials, or the general \u201cstochastic nature\u201d of CE.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Contact electrification (CE) was humanity\u2019s earliest and sole source of electricity until about the 18th century, but its real nature remains a mystery. Today, it is regarded as a critical component of technologies such as laser printers, LCD production processes, electrostatic painting, plastic separation for recycling, and more, as well as a major industrial hazard [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,219,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-physics","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149614\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}