Weird thing just happened (at least it’s weird to me, in my book) and I wish someone would explain it for me. I was neatening up around here and noticed on a corner table (plastic) a small wadded up piece of tape covered with lint. I picked it up and screamed (yeah) and dropped it because it was so warm that it was almost hot. And one just doesn’t pick up a piece of trash and expect it to be so warm as to be almost hot, thus the astonished screech. I felt the table, felt all around it and nothing was warm. The room is air conditioned and everthing else in here is relatively cool to the touch. Marty came in and picked up the tape I’d just dropped, commented it was still warm, but as he held it the heat rapidly dissipated within a couple of seconds and was gone.
Can someone explain this for me?
Update: A commentor wondered if it had come unstuck from a lightbulb and floated down. No, the nearest lighting fixture is a ceiling one about 7 feet away. The tape wad, though small, was heavy enough it would have dropped right to the ground.
I probably should further note this was an old wad of plain scotch tape and that I wasn’t doing anything like vacuuming. There’s also nothing electronic nearby either except for the recharger for a cell phone that is located on a bookshelf about 8 inches behind which was not being used and was cool to the touch. I’d not been moving around anything that was heated or electronic that it could have come unstuck from and fallen to the table. The table had not been used at least that day and no one had been around it.
Yeah, I know, silly, stupid mystery but I’d love to figure this out.
2nd update: Shakespeare’s Sister wondered about static electricity and I had wondered last night if there wasn’t something similar to do with radio waves going on but could the charge produced by a small wad of old tape be that intense? I did find the below on the internet on scotch tape producing radio waves. There was no visible sparking of the tape and it wasn’t adhered to the table. The only thing adhered to the tape was the lint. I didn’t pull the tape off anything. There was no metal involved. As noted above, the table it was resting on was plastic.
3.5 How does scotch tape work?
Believe it or not, this is a subject under research. It is believed that, when
the adhesive touches the plastic tape below it, both surfaces become elec-
trically charged because one material steals electrons from the other. If the
adhesive steals electrons, then the adhesive will have more electrons than
protons (net negative charge), and the plastic tape will have fewer electrons
than protons (net positive charge.) Note that no friction was involved!
â€Static electricity†in this case is also known as â€contact electrificationâ€,
and friction is not a requirement. When the two surfaces become oppositely
charged, the electrical charges remain close together, therefor the spool of
tape remains neutral (the tape contains an equal number of positive and
negative charges.) However, when you peel the tape off of the spool, you
SEPARATE the adhesive from the tape below it, and this separates the
regions of opposite charge. A high voltage appears between the positive and
negative charges, and this causes a â€discharge†or spark to appear that is
sometimes visible. The separated charges leap together through the air, and
as with any spark, this creates light.
The sparking will only discharge the tape partially, and the piece of tape
will remain charged, as will the surface of the tape remaining on the spool.
If you peel two strips of tape from the spool, then hold them near each other,
they will repel each other (because alike charges repel, and unlike charges
attract.)
TRY THIS EXPERIMENT: take a long piece of tape and stick it to
a painted metal surface, such as a filing cabinet or a refrigerator. Take a
small AM radio, turn the volume up, then tune it between two stations so
you hear no signals except static. Hold the radio near the tape, then peel
the tape from the metal. You will hear a crackling noise from the radio.
Those sparks from the tape are creating radio waves and your small radio can hear them.Source: http://personalwebs.oakland.edu/~rojo/P120/static_electricity.pdf
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