Or, you come inside from the cold, pull off your hat and......BOING!!! Static hair - that static electricity makes your hair stand straight out from your head. What is going on here? And why is static more of a problem in the winter?
To understand static electricity, we have to learn a little bit about the nature of matter. Or in other words, what is all the stuff around us made of?EVERYTHING IS MADE OF ATOMS
Imagine a pure gold ring. Divide it in half and give one of the halves away. Keep dividing and dividing and dividing. Soon you will have a piece so small you will not be able to see it without a microscope. It may be very, very small, but it is still a piece of gold. If you could keep dividing it into smaller and smaller pieces, you would finally get to the smallest piece of gold possible. It is called an atom. If you divided it into smaller pieces, it would no longer be gold.
Everything around us is made of atoms. Scientists so far have found only 115 different kinds of atoms. Everything you see is made of different combinations of these atoms.
