Transcript for: Understanding Insulators and Conductors
[Voiceover] It's useful to pretend like all materials in the
universe can be broken down into a category of insulator,
electrical insulator, or electrical conductor. That's not completely true. There are semi-conductors
and super conductors and other exotic forms
of electrical materials but for most introductory physics classes and problems and tests,
you can get pretty far assuming that it's either
an insulating material electrically or a conducting
material electrically. Before I talk about the
differences between these, here I have two solid cylinders of either an insulating material
or a conducting material. Before I talk about the
differences, one similarity is that both insulators and
conductors are composed of a huge number of atoms and molecules and these atoms and molecules, whether it be insulator or conductor, are composed of a
positively charged nucleus and a negatively charged
swarm of electrons that surround that nucleus. Another similarity is
that for both conductors and insulators, the positively
charge nucleus cannot move. I mean it can wiggle around and jiggle just from thermal vibrations,
maybe a little bit in place, but it can't travel freely
throughout the material for either an insulator or a conductor as long as it's a solid. If it was a fluid, I suppose
these things can move and migrate around, but for a solid the positively charge nucleus is fixed. They're stuck. The thing that might be able to move are the negatively charged electrons, and here's the difference. There are electrons in a conductor that can move about relatively freely. These can move around
with almost no resistance, whereas for insulators a key difference is that these electrons
cannot move around freely. These don't have the right
energy levels and bands in order to make these
electrons move around freely. They are also stuck. For insulators, everything
is basically stuck, These electrons might be able to jump around in their own atoms or get shared in a neighboring atom, but it can't jump around
freely from atom to atom and travel throughout the insulator. For the conductors, the
electrons can do this. that's the key difference. Now the electrons aren't just
going to do this on their own, they have to be compelled to start moving by hooking this up to a battery or setting up some sort of
electric field or force. If that did happen, the
electrons in a conductor start migrating down the line but in an insulator,
the electrons are stuck which might make you think that "Well, okay, shoot, for
electrical materials "all we really care
about are the conductors. "The insulators we will
just use if we don't want "electrical interaction." While that is somewhat true,
it is not completely true because if I set this
insulator up to a battery or set up some sort of
electric field or force in here even though the electrons in an insulator can't jump from atom to atom, what it can do is it can shift. This nucleus and the cloud of electrons can kind of shift a little bit. Positive may be this way, and the the negatives
over on the other end so what you get is overall
this side of the atom would be more negative, and this side of the atom
would be more positive. Even though the electron doesn't move, and the electrons don't move, now because this is set
up where the positive is shifted from the negative, this material, if you get
all of them to do this or a lot of them, this can create an overall electrical
effect where this insulator can interact with other charges nearby and exert forces on them. Even though the charges can't
flow through an insulator, they can still interact electrically. Now, let's see what happens
if we add extra charge to these insulators or conductors. I mean, the way they
started off right here we had just as many
positives in the nucleus as there are negatives surrounding them and that's true for the
conductors and insulators. What happens if we add extra charge? Maybe we add extra negatives into here. Then what happens? Well, it'll get really
messy if we try to draw it with all the atoms, so
since these all cancel out their overall charge,
I am not going to draw every atom and nucleus. I'm just going to pretend
like those are there and they are all canceling out. I'm just going to draw
the actual extra charge. Let's say we added extra negative charges to this insulator. What would happen? Let's say I just add
a negative charge here and a negative charge there, and here and there, I have added a bunch of negative charges to this insulator. What would happen? Well, we know these negatives can't move throughout and insulator. Charges can't flow through
an insulator so they're stuck which means for an
insulator, I could charge the whole thing uniformly if I wanted to where the charge is spread
out throughout the whole thing or I could make them bunch
up on one side if I wanted to and they'd be stuck there. The point is that they're stuck. For a conductor, what
would happen if I tried to put a negative here
and a negative there, some extra negative charge on a conductor? They don't have to stay
here if they don't want to. If you put extra negatives in here, they are not going to want to because negatives repel each other just like opposites
attract, like charges repel. So what are they going to do? Well, this negative is going
to try to get as far away from this other negative
as it can so go over here. This negative is going to try
to get as far away as it can. It repels it. Now, it can't jump off the conductor. That takes a lot more energy, but it can go to the very edge. That's what charges do for conductors. You've got a solid conducting material, you put extra charge on it, it's all... All that charge is going to
reside on the outside edge whether you've added extra
negative or positive, always on the outside edge. You can only add charge
to the outside edge for a conductor, because if
it wasn't on the outside edge it will quickly find its
way to the outside edge because all these
negatives repel each other. I said this is true for
positives or negative. You might wonder, "How
do we add a positive?" Well, the way you add a positive is by taking away a negative. If you started off with
a material that had just as many positives as negatives and you took away a negative, it's essentially like adding
a positive charge in here. But again, the net positive
charge, the net negative charge always resides on the
outside edge of the conductor because charges try to get as far away from each other as possible. So what physical materials
actually do this? What physical materials are insulators? These are things like
glass is an insulator. Wood is an insulator. Most plastics are insulators. All of these display this kind of behavior where you can distribute
charge and the charge can't flow through it. You can stick charge on it. In fact, you can stick
charge on the outside edge and it will stay there. There's conductors. These are things like metals, like gold or copper is typically used
because it's kind of cheap. Cheaper than gold, certainly. Or any other metal. Silver works very well. These are materials where charges can flow freely through them. Now that we see how conductors
and insulators work, let's look at an example. Let's say you have two conducting rods. Say these are made out of metal. One of them has a net amount
of negative charge on it which is going to reside
on the outside edge because that's what net
charge does on a conductor, but this other rod, this
other metal conducting rod, does not have any net charge on it. What would happen if I took this first rod touched it to the second rod? You probably guessed, charges want to get as far away from each other as possible so these negatives realize
"Hey, if we spread out, "some of us go on to this
rod and some of us stay here, "we can spread out even
father away from each other." That's what they would do. If these rods were the same size, you'd have equal amounts on each. If the second rod was bigger, more of them would go
on to this second one because that would allow
them to spread out even more. Some would stay on the smaller one. That's charged by just touching something. That's easy. You can charge something
also, you can get clever. You can do something called charge, you can charge something
by induction it's called. What does this mean? Charge by induction says alright, first imagine I just take this
and I bring it nearby but don't touch it. Just bring it near by
this other piece of metal and I don't touch it. What would happen? There is negatives in
here, I haven't drawn them. There's positives in here. The negatives can move if they wanted to. Do they want to? Yeah, they want to! These negatives are coming nearby, they want to get as far
away from them as possible. Even though there are
already some negatives here, a net amount of negatives are going to get moved over to this side. They were located with
their atom on this side, but they want to get away
from this big negative charge so they can move over here, which leaves a total amount of
positive charge over here. I.E. There is a deficit
of electrons over here, so this side ends up positively charged. You might think, "Okay, well that's weird. "They spread out. "Does anything else happen?" Yeah because now these positives
are closer to the negatives than the negatives are, and these positives in this charge rod are attracting these positives. These negatives in this conducting rod are attracting these positive charges because like charges repel
and opposites attract but they are also repelling. These negatives in this rod
are repelling these negatives. Do those forces cancel? They actually don't
because the closer you are to the charge the bigger the force. This would cause this rod to get attracted to the other rod. That's kind of cool. If you took a charged rod, brought it to an empty soda can, let that can sit on the table in this orientation so it could roll, if you bring the rod close the can will start moving towards the rod. It's kind of cool, you
should try it if you can. But, that's not charge by induction. Charge by induction is something more. It says alright, take this piece of metal and conduct it to ground. What's ground? Well, it could be the ground. If you took a big metal pipe
and stuck it in the ground that would count, or any other huge supply of electron, a place where you can
gain, steal, basically take infinitely many electrons or deposit infinitely many electrons and
this ground would not care. So the frame of your
car, the actual metal, is a good ground because it can supply a ton of electrons or take them. Or a metal pipe in the earth. Some place you can deposit
electrons or take them and that thing won't
really notice or care. Now what would happen? If I bring this negative
rod close to this rod that was originally had no net charge? Now instead of going to
the other side of this, they say "Hey, I can just leave. "Let me get the heck out of here." These negatives can leave. A whole bunch of negatives
can start leaving and what happens when that happens is that your rod is no longer uncharged. It has a net amount of charge now. They won't all leave. You're not going to get left
with no electrons in here. There's going to be
some electrons in there, but some of the electrons will leave which means that this rod,
which used to be uncharged now has a net amount of
positive charge in it. I've charged this rod
without even touching it because I let the
negative electrons leave. If I'm clever, what I can do
is I can just cut this wire before I take away the thing
that induced the charge. If I remove this now and move it far away, what these negatives would have done is they would have said "Shoot, okay, "I am glad that that's over. "Now I can rejoin. "I'm attracted to this positive again. "I'm going to rejoin my positives." and this thing will become uncharged again but now they can't get back. They're stuck. There's no way for these to get back because you've cut the cord here and you've permanently
charged this piece of metal without even touching it. It's called charge by induction. It's a quick way we charge something up. Let me show you one more example. Everyone's tried this. You take a balloon. What happens?
How do you charge it up? You rub it against your hair. It steals electrons from your hair and the balloon becomes
negatively charged. What do you do with it? You know what you do with it. You take this thing and you
put it near a wall or a ceiling and if you're lucky, it sticks there, which is cool! How does it work? Well, remember, this is an
insulating material rubber. The ceiling is an insulating material. Electrons aren't getting transferred but even in an insulating
material, the atom can reorient or polarize by shifting. The negatives in that
atom can shift to one side and the other side becomes
a little more positive and what that does, it causes a net force between the ceiling and the balloon because these positives
are a little closer. These positives are attracting negatives and the negatives are
attracting the positives with a little bit greater a force than these negatives are repelling the other negatives in the ceiling. Because of that, because the ceiling is also attracting the balloon and the balloon is attracting the ceiling with greater force than the negatives are repelling the balloon,
the balloon can stick because of the insulating
material's ability to polarize and cause
and electric attraction. This is what I said earlier. Even if it's an insulator, sometimes it can interact
with something electric because the atom can shift and polarize.