(S)Poof!

Another video, reminiscent of the viral popcorn-popped-with-a-cellphone video I discussed a while back

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And, in fact one of the response videos is with popcorn

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Also one involving toast

Objections: One is electrostatic. Matt has been discussing static charge distributions recently (here and here) and it’s very important to note that he’s discussing charge distributions on conductors — the charges can easily rearrange themselves. But in these video examples, the people and the targets are not conductors. So while you might build up some static charge on a person (in a very questionable display of boys gleefully rubbing other boys with balloons. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if that’s who you are, balloon-fetish-freaks). A discharge to another insulator just isn’t going to send the energy where you want it to. A small discharge will even out the potential difference, and you’re done. A full discharge needs to be to a conductor, preferably a grounded one.

Speaking of sending the energy, how much energy are we discussing here? I’m not sure how much energy it takes for an eggsplosion, but I’m guessing we’re talking well above a few Joules. Accounting for my slight overestimation of the water content in the earlier popcorn analysis, it probably still takes somewhere north of 10 Joules of energy to pop a single kernel. Can we get anywhere close with static charge?

The energy stored in a capacitor is 1/2 CV^2. The capacitance of the human body is a few hundred picofarads. Let’s be generous and say it’s 2,000 picofarads (pico is 10^-12). How much of a potential difference do we need for 10 Joules? Do the math — it’s 100 kV. A few kV makes for a painful spark when discharging to a doorknob. A 5 mm spark between conducting spheres happens at about 16 kV. A realistic spark leaves us at significantly less than a Joule of energy.

Spoof