"charging" your minds !

Take Charge !

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

Well, am back after a long gap! I think its high time to start the discussion about one of the magic entity – CHARGE!. Am not sure if I could clearly tell what charge is, but this page isn’t about that, it is about the questions I have about charge and the way I think my mind could explain it. So am sure there are errors in my thinking and I think in science to error is to educate!

 This all happened a year after our rigorous training in mechanics (classical). Time came when my sir had to start the basics of electricity with the chapter “electrostatics”. Being a mechanics lover I thought it was a big leap. Since I thought none of the higher physics (like this one) could be explained through Newtonian mechanics, and as a Newton lover it seemed to be disappointing. So here it begun!

 As it was a custom to start this chapter with the rubbing of silk, he started – “when some objects are rubbed with others it is found that they ‘interact’ with each other after rubbing, this interaction is called static electricity.” Though this seemed to be a loose statement, but it is ‘Ok’ to start with. Mind me he is a person who cares about each and every statement he makes, and mind me again we students are damn cautious to ‘critically review’ (as my sir would say!) every words that vibrates from his mouth. In fact I appreciate his way of introducing this concept in a customary but a careful way, which is, he dint mention about the magic word –charge! I think this is one of the best ways of introducing this chapter!

 And he adds “to explain this phenomenon people thought ‘something’ had moved between those rubbing particles and they named it to be charge”. He said that all bodies have infinite charge to begin with and different bodies have different tendencies to take up charge (why? Well let’s not bother about this at this time, infact this was not answered at beginning when they found this fact! ).So thus when I rub some bodies charge from one body moves to another. Then I thought it was just like the ‘mass’ concept, just like when I transfer some mass from one body to another mass adds up in one and subtracts it self in another. But wait! He then added that these interactions can be repulsive too!. And thus to explain the dual type of interactions they needed to classify charges into two categories that is positive and negative (these are just the nomenclature used to describe them nothing more than that). I think this one is amazing.
 

 Lets now think how this positive and negative makes things easy, or why it amuses me. Let’s take a step back to mechanics. Imagine a body in equilibrium, top of the mind to think about the forces acting on the body, we would say force =0. But carefully observing it is actually the net force that is 0. I mean one could pull the body to the right (applying positive force taking right as positive) and other pull the box to left (negative force taking right as positive) with the same magnitude and still the box remains in equilibrium. So instead of thinking of a number ‘0’ I could think of ‘1 + -1’ or 2 + -2’ or ‘positive + negative’, I think this is a brilliant way of thinking. Introducing a the concept of negative number into real life problems are not usual as even in mechanics we applied sign conventions, but those are just mathematical but now the concept of charge is real and thus this shows the importance of those numbers sitting behind zero!, I always had an uncomfortable feeling when my math teacher started teaching the number line having negative numbers, I was like oh man! that doesn’t make sense , like every time I see a pen I say I have one pen or two or three, not like I am having -1 + 2 pen !. But after this charge concept I turned out like - ah! Now I see these negative numbers. They really do need to show up in daily life. But now this doesn’t amuse me because whenever I see these negative I use this analogy – imagine I have 10 pens and I give all my 10 pens to my friend. Now I can say that he is having 10 pens or I am having -10 pens compared to him (that is 0 pens). Thus here it shows that negative numbers are often used as a comparing methodology.

 Well giving a cleaner observation on this it seems that some data is lost while using the method of negative numbers. When I say am having 10 pens less than what he has, the information we could extract from this fact is that if he id having 10 pens I would have 0 pens or if he is having ‘x’ pens I would have ‘x-10’ pens. So I don’t know how much pen he is having, while in the first case when I say I give 10 pens to him I know he is for sure having 10 pens. So why did they choose the method of ‘negative’ when it does actually reduce transferring information?. Well I think this way of negative may be ineffective in providing information in the places where you have information, but in the situations where you may have to start with initially this works the best. Ok I think you are confused. Let me give another analogy.

 Thus this same way charge could be seen. When I rub two bodies charges get transferred since we don’t know the initial amount of charges present in both of bodies, I would say that one body is having a charge of ‘+ x’(just like box A having +5) while other is having ‘-x’ or lacking ‘x’(just like box B having -5).

 Ok having talked about the use of this type of convention, we need to know a bit more about how ‘science’ or to be clear ‘nature’ works , in order to precede further. will meet you up in my next essay !..