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Imagine I take a small grapefruit (about 100 grams), and a magic wand, and use the magic wand to :

  1. Remove all the electrons from my grapefruit.
  2. Prevent said grapefruit from exploding into a thin plasma.

What would be the force of the electrical field generated by my positive ionic grapefruit at a distance of 1 meter away? For instance, what force would be felt by electrons and, respectively, protons in a mosquito one meter away?

Serban Tanasa
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  • Just the answer in Coulombs won't tell me anything. I want to know if the poor mosquito will feel a gentle nudge, be zapped by lightning, blown into a smudge onto the nearest wall, or what? – Serban Tanasa Dec 06 '14 at 04:07

1 Answers1

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HInt: Force on what? You need some charge to exert the force on. Otherwise you can calculate the electric field. To do that, you need to know the number of protons in $100$ g of normal matter. Since electrons don't weight anything and (at this level of approximation) there are the same number of neutrons and protons....

Ross Millikan
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