Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Chemistry => Topic started by: tony6789 on 08/01/2008 20:47:44
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if electricty atom is made up of an even number of protons and and and even number of electrons,and assuming you take protons away and it becomes positively charged and if you take electrons away it becomes negativly charged then ifmore and more electrons were added wat wud happen is there a max # of them???? or wat happens if you just have like say tons of protons and one electron is it still an elctricity atom???
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Right idea, but wrong polarity.
Protons are positively charged, and electrons are negatively charged; so if you take an electron away, the atom will be less negatively charged, which is to say it would be more positively charged.
Similarly, if a proton is taken away (more probably, a proton may be converted to a neutron), then the atom will be less positively charged, which is to say it becomes more negatively charged.
You can remove all of the electrons from an atom - in this state, and where you have a collection of atomic nuclei that are totally stripped of their electrons, what you have is plasma.
Alpha radiation is a particular case where you have helium nuclei without any electrons, but in that case, helium is a very light atom, so would only normally have 2 electrons.
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so then wud it still b electricity??
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Are you talking about electricity, or electric charge?
Electricity is caused by the movement of electrons, so that any electron that moves along a wire is replaced by another electron behind it - it is not caused by a reduction in the number of electrons in the wire, just the movement of electrons.
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electric charge say if a bunch of these protons with 2 electrons got together an moved through a wire wud it stil create "electricity"?
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Protons are unlikely to move through a wire; it would be like saying Hydrogen atoms could pass through the walls of a copper container.
The protons (in the nuclei) of a conductor stay still - bonded in place by the strong electric forces - and the electrons drift through the conductor, moving from one atom to the next with very little effort (resistance).
When we talk about 'charge', we usually mean the amount of unbalanced charge. There will be zillions of protons and the same number of zillions of electrons in an object plus a few extra billions of one or the other. It is this excess which we would see as charge.
When the charge flows around we call it an electric current. The speed at which the actual electrons flow in a metal is a few mm per second.