Electric fields are like gravitational fields in a couple of important ways. They both have forces that act at a distance. Remember with the gravitational field, in order to walk up stairs, you are doing work (exerting a force) against the pull of gravity. Your body naturally wants to be at the ground level, and it takes work to get it up a flight of stairs. You move from a lower potential energy to a higher potential energy as you walk up those stairs. When you walk up the stairs, you are adding gravitational potential energy to your body. And it doesn't matter how wacky the staircase is... it can have curves, dips, switchbacks, and more... but it's only the beginning and end points that we care about when calculating the gravitational potential energy.Electric Potential Difference.
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You are right – electrical charges are everywhere! When you get yourself a piece of tape, there’s a static charge on the tape itself from un-sticking from itself (you can see this if you’ve ever tried to delicately tape two pieces of paper together, only to have them rise up to meet the tape when you hover just above the paper). When you take socks out of the dryer, slide down a plastic slide, and so on. You can build instruments to detect electrical charge like the “Electroscope” (https://www.sciencelearningspace2.com/2013/08/cosmic-ray-detector/) and the “Alien Detector” (https://www.sciencelearningspace2.com/2010/03/advanced-static-electricity-experiment-alien-detector/)
In the static electricity and balloon activities, we purposely built up a negative charge in the balloon and then observed what happened in situations of induction and conduction. What about objects we come near or touch through out the day–what sort of electrical field changes or movements are going on, and is there a way to sense it?