On 04/01/2017 12:52 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 04/01/2017 12:30 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 1 Apr 2017 12:16:35 -0400, Phil Hobbs
wrote:

On 04/01/2017 12:11 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 1 Apr 2017 11:22:41 -0400, Phil Hobbs
wrote:

On 04/01/2017 11:12 AM, Tom Biasi wrote:
On 4/1/2017 10:32 AM, wrote:
Scientists have determined that ground is no longer at ground
potential.
snip a bunch of junk
Reprinted from: The Electro Scientific Journal

This is what happens from abuse of drugs. The earth now has an 8
volt potential in reference to what?

I think one of Feynman's lectures asks about what the electrostatic
potential of the Earth is.

The answer is that it's close to zero, since the Earth is immersed
in a conducting medium (the solar wind).

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Is the solar wind neutral? Spacecraft typically charge a bit
negative. Seems to me that the sun could be a giant thermionic
cathode.

The electric field near the ground is big, around 150 volts/meter,
positive going up.

http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_09.html

Yup--thunderstorms pump charge in that direction, but once you get to
the top of the atmosphere the net enclosed charge is near zero.

The solar wind has to be neutral on average, because otherwise the
voltage on the Sun would increase indefinitely.



Over tens of billions of years average. Maybe all those electrons will
gradually return when the sun cools off.

The self-capacitance of the Sun isn't very large--its radius is about
700,000 km. The Gaussian unit of capacitance is the centimetre (which
is close to a picofarad), and the self-capacitance of a sphere equals
its radius in centimetres.

Thus the capacitance of the Sun is about 7E10 cm, or 0.08 F.

Wiki says that the number of particles ejected by the Sun is about
1.3E36 per second, which is about 2E17 coulombs/s, counting both
positive and negative, and ignoring alpha particles having a charge of +2.

The maximum energy of the ejected particles is around 10 keV, so if the
Sun's voltage with respect to the rest of the universe reached +- 10 kV,
one sign of free particle would be unable to escape.

With 10**17 amps worth of the other polarity continuing to stream out,
and only 80 mF of capacitance, this would be corrected in about 10**-18
seconds.

Whoops, 10**-14 seconds. Much gentler.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
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